Bam’s reading Escape from Camp 14 and relating to me the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk, the only person ever known to have escaped the brutal North Korean labor camps. Born in the gulag, he wasn’t even aware of the outside world until he met a knew inmate who told him about it – in a scene I imagine like that old dude in Count of Monte Cristo who told the hero about hidden treasure.
Too bad, unlike Count of Monte Cristo, Dong-Hyuk
isn’t able to exact any revenge. In the camps, he was raised to snitch
and witness regular executions, including those of his mother and
brother. He endured torture with coals, a finger chopped off, starvation
and it’s all just so intensely hectic. I like this word, hectic.
South Africans use it in place of awful or excruciating. “Did you hear
Josh was murdered?” one might tell another and the response, “Hectic!”
which to me spins an atrocity into something almost surmountable – a
quality that people used to facing atrocities must always possess.
