Escape from Camp 14, by Blaine Harden, review This episode of casual violence merits just one page of Shin's 224-page memoir, written by Blaine Harden, a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, after seven interviews spanning two years. There are too many other horrors jostling for space. Shin's right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp factory (two paragraphs). His father's leg is broken below the knee and sticks out at an unnatural angle (one paragraph). An 11-year-old girl has her foot crushed in a coal mine and her toe amputated without anaesthetic and treated with salt water (two paragraphs). Harden writes that Shin's "lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer's fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement... His shins, from ankle to leg on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electric barbed wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14. Perhaps most shocking of all, Shin's mother and older brother are executed in front of him, when he was 14, after he ratted their escape plan out to guards, hoping for leniency and an extra food ration. As he watched them die, he was relieved it was not him. He was angry with his mother and brother for planning an escape. Shin, now 30 and living in the South Korean capital Seoul, is the only person born inside a North Korean labour camp to have escaped to tell his story, though there are several other former detainees who have been released and made their way to the South. He was "witness number one" at a United Nations' special commission earlier this year to look into his country's human rights abuses. This book then, together with Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick, is a vital chronicle of life inside North Korea. Shin was the product of a "reward marriage," a bonus offered by the camp guards for "hard work and reliable snitching." Neither his mother or father had any choice in their union. His father, who was allowed to visit five nights a year, told Shin that he had been given his mother as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp's machine shop. They had two sons, eight years apart. By the time Shin was four his older brother had been sent to a dormitory, leaving his mother as his only competition for food. Each day she would prepare corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup, and when she left him alone he would eat not only his own lunch, but hers too, earning him a furious beating with "a hoe, a shovel, anything that was close at hand." Still, Shin took as much food as he could from his mother as often as he could. It did not occur to him that if he ate her lunch, she would go hungry. At school he was trained for hard labour, clearing snow in the winter, chopping down trees, shovelling coal and chipping frozen excrement from toilets to use as fertiliser. By the time he was 10, he was working in a coal mine. His gulag held 15,000 prisoners, spread over a 30-mile by 15-mile camp around 40 miles from Pyongyang in the mountains. By reputation it is the most fearsome of North Korea's six labour camps and a "complete control district" where prisoners, called "irredeemables" are worked to death. As Harden notes, North Korea's labour camps now hold between 150,000 and 200,000 prisoners and have existed for twice as long as the Soviet gulags and 12 times longer than Nazi concentration camps. And yet their horror has been eclipsed in the public eye by the cyclical drama of North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship. The camps, writes Harden, "have barely pricked the world's collective conscience." After first writing Shin's story for a front page piece in the Washington Post in 2008, it was not easy to convince him to give a fuller account. "I often felt like a dentist drilling without anaesthetic," writes Harden. Shin, who had no knowledge of what lay beyond the camp's electrified fence, began plotting an escape only after meeting a fellow prisoner who described the outside world to him. After a wince-inducing break out, he went first to China, then to Seoul, then to the United States. He has since become attached to the Christian groups which often help North Korean refugees and spends much of his time raising awareness about North Korean abuses. But, as he said earlier this year in an interview with the Financial Times, all he wants to do now is to erase his memories. I do not want to think about the past any more. Escape from Camp 14, by Blaine Harden 256pp, Pan, Telegraph Bookshop: £8.99 (plus £1.15 p&p) 0844 871 1514