Everyone's seen images from the Holocaust. Oftentimes they're blurry, low-quality photographs, but they don't need to be HD to catch the soul-crushing amount of pain, suffering and cruelty that the victims faced. I didn't know people could grow so thin, skin stretched like spandex over bones, until the first time I saw an image of Holocaust victims. I knew people could do bad things, but in my childish naïveté I didn't know that human beings could reach the level of hellish cruelty which I had, until then, reserved for the likes of demons. Then I learned, and I grew up.
It makes you believe in evil.
We did right to do what we could to halt the seemingly unstoppable force that was Hitler in his prime. We did right to do everything that we could to set those people free and to piece together the shards of broken families. We won that fight, so we shout to the heavens, to God Himself, that it'll never happen again. We tell ourselves, "Remember, so that it'll never happen again."
But it is happening again, right now, as your eyes flit across these words. And just as you likely turned your eyes from the unfettered cruelty exposed through the images of the Holocaust, you likely want to turn away from this. You probably don't want to know, especially since we're pretty powerless to do anything about it. If I'm going to be honest, that was my first reaction -- until the anger kicked in. The kind of rage that makes you want to do actual damage, to physically go out there and put an end to it yourself. I can't do that, though -- I'm powerless to make any sort of physical difference; I am, after all, a tiny, five-foot-nothing English major. I do have words, though, and words are exactly what I'll use to make a difference. I'll make sure that people know that the Holocaust has simply moved on and given itself a new name.
We've all learned about the Holocaust, and the concentration camps in North Korea are much the same, but they have thrived twelve times as long as the Nazi's camps did. People who have committed no real crimes face starvation, beatings, torture, rape and public executions on a daily basis. There is one major difference, however, between Hitler's concentration camps and the camps that have made North Korea their stronghold: third generational punishment.
Imagine that your father, mother and siblings are starving to death on the meager rations the government doles out, so you decide to escape to China, where you hope to earn money and send it back to your family. This is a move of desperation -- one that endangers your entire family. If the government finds out, they will throw your mother, father, siblings, nieces and nephews, and grandparents into a concentration camp, whether or not they can find you. Even if your "crime" is as simple as watching a smuggled copy of "The Avengers," you are a traitor. Treachery is thought to run in the blood, so if you are a traitor, then so is your entire family -- and they will be sentenced to a traitor's torturous death in WWII-style concentration camps.
Babies born in the camps are doomed to live there for life as well -- if they escape the multitude of fates that await them in the camps. After all, babies in the camps are only born one of three ways: the imprisonment of a pregnant woman, rape, or a marriage conceived and coerced by the guards for their own entertainment. The babies are irrelevant and often unwanted; pregnant women are beaten and given hard labor in an attempt to induce miscarriages or are given forced abortions. If babies survive to term, guards throw them into boiling water or to starving dogs as soon as they're born, or take a sick enjoyment from making the mothers strangle them. Childhood is just as hard, as children are not exempted from starvation, heavy labor, beatings and torture. Shin Dong Hyuk, who was born in a concentration camp from a camp-ordered marriage, saw a classmate of his, a six-year-old girl, beaten to death by their teacher for hoarding a few kernels of corn.
There is a massive consequence of being born and raised in the camps that Shin Dong Hyuk's story makes painfully clear. As a child, he didn't learn about the outside world -- only camp law. He had never been full in his entire life, and had never known anything but beatings and picking undigested corn from cow dung to survive. The camp was his world -- he couldn't imagine that life could be anything other than what he experienced.
His moral code was camp law, too, so when he overheard his mother and brother planning to escape, he told a guard, hoping that he would be rewarded with food. In his mind, his mother and brother were doing something morally wrong -- one of the worst crimes you can commit in the camps -- and they needed to be punished. He might as well benefit from being the one to turn them in. The guard, however, took this piece of intelligence and passed it along to his superiors without saying where he got it from, and Dong Hyuk was kept in a small, underground prison cell for seven months and tortured with fire. Eventually he was released from the underground part of the camp, but he was forced to watch as they hanged his mother and a firing squad shot his brother. He was just thirteen.
This is the daily reality of hundreds of thousands of people. It is a reality that few people talk about. Is it genuine ignorance, or is it a willful ignorance that we resort to because we can't march in and free them? I'm not entirely sure, but I will say this: Ignorance, genuine or otherwise, never helped anyone. The North Korean people need our help,and there are plenty of organizations out there full of people who risk their lives to help them. I'm not asking you to risk your life, but I am asking you to inform yourself and others. Don't let the North Korean people die in obscurity, and don't disgrace the victims of the Holocaust by turning your face from the North Korean people as you shout, "Remember, so that it'll never happen again!"
