Literature is a way to tell not only individual stories, but the stories that speak to the collective values of society and humanity. Through individual stories, one can find representations of what society values and also what human beings tend to do over time. This is especially true of stories of struggle and woe. Escape from Camp 14 is a very good example of this. Written by Blaine Harden, this story details the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, a man who escaped from one of the most heinous North Korean internment camps in the entire country. As Harden details in his work, Shin Dong-hyuk was forced to endure a lot, and while his story is one of triumph over the elements in the end, it also highlights some of the inexorable truths of the human experience. Namely, it makes clear that human beings are complex, and their actions must be viewed in light of this reality. Human nature, it seems, tends toward selfishness and other virtues that are not particularly ideal for a communal society. At the end of the day, despite the moral consequences, humans will always result back to acting in an evil manner because a person’s mind needs to act selfishly, deceitfully, and aggressively to flourish.
Selfishness appears to be a part of the human condition, and this book provides a good picture of both how this can happen and what consequences follow when selfishness plays itself out. The book details the trials and tribulations of the people forced to live under oppressive conditions in what is inarguably the worst camp of a host of bad camps in this country. As the book makes clear, when human beings are put under excruciating conditions, they can tend to act selfishly, even to the point of selling out those people who are closest to them. The book’s focus character, Dong-hyuk, is a very good example of how this can take place. Under the pressures of the camp, he became one of the many people who informed upon other members of the camp. When he learned of his brother and mother’s plan to escape the camp, he turned them in to the authorities. This was a grave decision, and it eventually led to the execution of his family members. Human beings, though, can turn selfish in times where they are reduced to their base instincts, acting in an “only me” manner that often leads to disaster for the people them. In exchange for this information, he gained a slightly easier job in the school and an easier life, a selfish trade-off that cost the lives of his family members. The lead character is only one example of how this took place in the camp, and as the book describes, it is perhaps the default of human beings to choose to act in their own self-interest for survival, rather than seeking to look after the sanctity and survival of the people around them.
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A true study on human nature, the book details the ways in which human beings will use deceit to their advantage, especially when they are put in positions where lying is necessary for survival. The interpersonal struggles suffered by the lead character become palpable, even after he has escaped from harm in the camp. He has difficulty building trust and maintaining bonds, mostly because he becomes something of a pathological liar to the people around him. He moves from place to place, going into China and into America for a part of the time. In neither of those places did he learn to trust people, and the truth, it seemed, was only utilized to the extent that utilizing it was convenient. While this young man is on the extreme side of the scale, with his behaviors being shaped by his ghastly experience, his is one that recalls much of the human experience. Human beings, the author notes, will return to their base default of lying and deceit, especially when they do not have any ties to a family or community to keep them honest.
Aggression is the order of the day in difficult conditions, and in fact, it becomes a survival instinct. In this book, the lead character learns how to use aggression to his benefit when he is not using other tools, like deceit, to stay alive. Human beings are programmed in this way, and it has been seen time and again in other similar settings. In many death and internment camps, prisoners get harsh toward one another in an effort to fight for limited resources. This was true in Germany during World War II. It was also true in American internment camps for Japanese people during that same war. In this book, people fight over the best jobs, and they fight over the limited resources. Resources are so scarce that prisoners are asked to collect frozen human excrement in some instances, a stunning detail that truly highlights the difficulty.
This book brings to light many elements of human nature. While it is natural to try and find the good parts of humanity, and to see every story is a triumph of the human spirit, not every story can be that. Even this one, with a young man escaping from the horrors of a North Korean internment camp, is a story that brings to bear some of the worst things that humans are capable of doing. In this case, the author tells the story of human selfishness, human deceit, and human aggression, as people do what they can to survive the harsh conditions around them.
- Harden, Blaine. “Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. 1.” (2012).
- Stanley, Jerry. I am an American: A true story of Japanese internment. Crown Publishers, 1994.
- Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps. Macmillan, 1997.
