It is hard to find time to read. I developed my love for reading as a boy. By the age of ten i was reading all kinds of crazy stuff. Don quixote of ivanhoe. And trash, too. Alice in wonderland. A faraway look comes into the childs eyes. His or her mouth drops open and you no that the child is lost in the story. From noon to 4 00 p. M. In your timezone. A web site once again . Penguin random house. Com readathon or Search National readathon date is the first thing that comes up. Thank you very much. Thank you. Recently shinned i get a man who escaped in 2000 by front north korea and prison camp after being born there admitted he did not accurately portray some parts part of his experiences when telling a story to Blaine Harden. Journalist Blaine Harden appeared on cspans q a program in 2012 to discuss his book escape from camp 14 based on his story. This is about an hour. Cspan Blaine Harden your book is called escape from camp 14 and in your first sentence in the preface is his first memory is an execution. What are you talking about . Guest the story is about a kid at this point in the story. He was born in camp 14. One of the political labor camps of north korea. His first memory at the age of four was going with his mom to a place near where he grew up in the camp to watch somebody get shot and shootings, public executions in the camp were held every few weeks. They were a way of punishing people who violated the camp rules and terrorizing the 20 to 40,000 people who lived in the camp to obey the rules from then on. Cspan you say in your book you have been in north korea once. Did you get to see a camp . Guest nobody has been to a camp other than north korean guards officials and the people who go to them and almost never come out. There are now five or six of these camps and they contain between 150 and 200,000 prisoners and with the exception of one camp they are no exit places where one goes if you are believed or imagined by the north korean government of having done something wrong, as having been a wrongdoer or a wrong thinker. And you go there without trial. Usually you are taken away at night and you stay there for the rest of your life and very often you go with your kids and with your parents. I was at a conference yesterday on concentration camps and the latest information is half of the people in the camps now are believed to be just a relative of wrongdoers or wrong thinkers. So collective guilt is wearing much a part of the system. The reason the camps exist and have existed for more than 40 years is because they on an island in pyongyang and taken to various places that they want to show off, statues, assembly halls, grand avenues, the subway and then we were taken to the airplane and left two and a half days later. So my understanding of north korea based on that trip is bizarre and full of white concrete and very emasculate dressed guards but thats not the reality of north korea. The way you find out about the reality of north korea is increasingly easy for her purported to do it, its to go to stohl south korea where there are now close to 30,000 defectors in south korea almost all of whom have arrived in the past 10 years. And you can talk to them and they are by far the best sources about what its like to live in a country and how difficult it is to get out. There are now 60 former camp inmates and former guards in total who have been interviewed by human Rights Groups who have given a very detailed nuanced and really credible picture of what goes on in the camp and that picture in their words has been supplemented by increasingly detailed satellite images of all the camps. Cspan 23 million in the north. How many in the south . Guest one and 50 million. And there are really two different places, two different universes. South korea is now the 11th largest economy in the world. It has people obsessed with education. They work really hard. They have less leisure than any other country in the developed world and they commit suicide at a very high rate in fact the highest rate in the world now. Its a highpressure, high achieving education obsessed culture. That really does not pay a lot of attention to north korea in the cultural sense or in the aspirational sense. He deals with north korea because it must because of the troublemaking neighbor. Cspan if my memory is correct we lost 50,000 americans in the korean war. Back in the early 50s. What was that war about and what was south korea then compared to north korea . Guest well they were both poor and they were both recovering from the ravages of world war ii. And that war the United States divided the Korean Peninsula in the wake of world war ii between the north and the south and the south was sort of a military dictatorship aligned with United States and the north was a military dictatorship aligned mostly with russia. Kim ilsung was the leader who emerged in north korea and he over period of 10 years created a cult of personality around himself. He modeled his state after stalin state and then he invaded south korea in 1951. And made some Real Progress across south korea. There was a counterattack by u. S. Led forces and United Nations forces that ran over the course of three years. They fought for a stalemate in the same line was returned in north and south korea have been deprived ever since. North korea remained allied with russia and with china but north korea developed a brand of totalitarian leadership that became increasingly isolated and increasingly cruel as time went by. Kim ilsung was a popular leader. He had a real grassroots support from lots of North Koreans. And when he died in 1994 people genuinely wept. His son the first hereditary dictator in a communist state kim jongil was less popular and he didnt have a popular touch. But he was shrewd and he was cruel and the camps as an instrument of enforcement became increasingly important. And the population grew. There are indications now with this third kim family leader kim jong m. Who is 28, 29 years old and interestingly its about the same age as the hero in my book its unclear how popular he will be or if he will have control at this point. Cspan we will come back to your hero the book shin after a show you some video from our first book interview back in 1991 i asked you if you like to travel. [video playing] i went to school and i got interested in faraway lands pretty remember as a kid in college i didnt believe they existed. I really didnt. Sometimes i would go to bed thinking Walter Cronkite in those other people were putting together a big elaborate deception. They were photographing in the world outside of what i knew wasnt there. And i always wanted particularly to see what was there. Cspan do remember saying that . Guest yes i do and i did think that and i sort of spent my life proving myself wrong, proving my college self wrong by traveling and being a Foreign Correspondent. Cspan when we talk to the Washington Post and you wrote a book about africa but since then where have you lived . Guest in Eastern Europe. I was there for the collapse of communism and the yugoslav wars which is a really interesting mix because one was a story full of joy and hope and reconciliation. The probably shouldnt wear and czechoslovakia people came out by the hundreds of thousands and listen to his incredible speeches and left the main square and didnt even step on the flower beds. It was a wonderful joyous thing to do and to be a part of. And then the yugoslav crackup came and it was a horrible mess then americans didnt understand. It was incredibly dangerous. It won on for a long time. I did not see it all through. I left about twothirds of the way through it and came home and wrote a book about another subject and felt terrible guilt. And actually some posttraumatic stress because i spent a lot of time in a lot of time is. The wind had taken a lot of risks. I didnt think i had done a good job in the bad guys were winning when i left. So it was a very strange assignment from joy to really heartbreak. Cspan in 1995 you were talking about a book on the Columbia River. Lets watch this clip. We were on the bus at the time. [video playing] i was born there and i grew up there. Cspan had given back whately . Guest i spent part of 199394 if they are writing a book about the Columbia River which is a big environmental problem out there. Cspan the death and the famine have been to a large extent wiped out and theres a huge Public Policy debate. Whats interesting about the place is my family went there and i was born in the town that the water was diverted from the Columbia River to irrigate farms around the town and my family and my ability to go to college depended on destroying the river. That is what the stories about. Cspan Lake Washington is where . Guest is in the Columbia Basin almost in the middle of washington state. It was a desert and a brand built grand cooley dan and diverted water from the Columbia River interin that desert into a very productive farm area. Cspan said he left Eastern Europe and came back here and then where did you go . Guest i went to the New York Times for four years and i was a roving National Correspondent and also i did stories about africa and Eastern Europe. I went back to the post which was the mother ship as all the editors call that end it really was the place that had hired me when i was young when i first came on your show. So i went back and then i covered the American West for the Washington Post from 2003 until 2007 and then they said do you want to go to asia and i said well i i dont know. My wife said yes you should go. So we went with our little daughter and son and we were there until 2010. Cspan where did you live . Guest in tokyo. But when i went to japan my boss boss, the boss of the Foreign Correspondent at the post he said you are a feature writer. I want you to do something that is hard and something you probably dont want to do and i want you to write about north korea. I want you to bash her your head against that story until a something new. Tell us how it works and if he failed thats fine but if you dont try and going to be very unhappy. So i started to work on that. Cspan this book has on the cover of picture this young man. Who is a . Guest he was born in the camp and he escaped and as far as we know he is the only individual on earth born in those camps to get out and tell what its like to grow up in the camp. Cspan where did you get the idea to do a book about him . Guest i interviewed him in 2008 and wrote a story that was on the front page that really resulted in an incredible emotional reaction by the readers. They wanted to know more about him and about the camps. They wanted to give him money and save his soul so i went back a few weeks after that came out and i said lets do a book. Lets dig into everything you know about that camp about how you got out of there and what it was like to walk across north korea and he didnt trust me and didnt want to do it. So i begged him for nine months and human Rights Groups who had become familiar with the story said you should cooperate because this will further your goals which is to make the world aware of these camps and also it will maybe create some sort of governmental pressure in the United States so that human rights become at the top of the agenda when we deal with north korea. Host you made an arrangement about the money. Guest we split the money and that was important to him because he doesnt have any money. And he doesnt really have any business other than being a survivor of this camp and then we started to work on it. Cspan where did you get the idea that even have a story . Guest i knew he had a story because a friend of mine who has become a very close friend who is with the u. S. Committee on human rights in north korea she met my wife at a book group and told her about this guy and then i talked to her and then i went to stohl and had lunch with him. Its really interesting the language because i dont speak korean and he doesnt speak anything other than korean. We did interviews in seoul and in seattle and we also did hundreds of emails. Cspan i want to show picture view in front of the story in seoul. What were the circumstances . Guest this was during one of our weeks of interviews in seoul and 2009. Cspan how tall are you in how tall is he . Guest i am sixfoot one inch and he is about 5 feet 6 inches. Maybe 5 feet 5 inches. He is wanted for malnutrition and disarms her bowed from childhood labor. Most of the male population of north korea suffers from malnutrition. When males come to south korea and now theyre about 30,000 of them they are on average now according to the south korean government more than 5 inches shorter than their south korean contemporaries. Thats an amazing statement about the nutrition and south korea. Cspan where is the twoday . Guest today hes in washington because we are promoting the book but he had moved six or seven months ago from the United States back to seoul where he is doing web broadcasting with young human rights friends and he brought other defectors on to talk about north korea. Cspan so the translation was it expensive . Guest no it wasnt that expensive. A lot of people cared about Shin Donghyuk and they cared about historian wanted to get it out. I had really good translators some of whom worked for the Washington Post in seoul but the most important translator was a young guy named david kim who is a friend of shins and a family who fed shin in Southern California when he was living in a suburb of los angeles. David kim offered to be a translator and hes a graduate of yale. Hes now at Northwestern Law School and he is incredibly smart and he is really multilingual and idiomatic american english as well as he speaks korean. His parents dont speak much english and hes a good friend. He developed the translating in Southern California which where did the bulk of the reporting and when shin shin really opened up after year. Cspan wears his picture taken . Guest this is a group house in california where shin was living and working for a Human Rights Group which helped bring shin to United States in 2009 and where he was an unpaid volunteer. They gave him housing in this group house and he lived there between 12 and 25 people within that house. Mostly people younger than him. Cspan how old is he today . Guest he is 29. Cspan you have a lot of torture stories in this book. Go to the one and this is out of context but so people can understand how far went with him, the story about him being put over a guest when he was 13 years old he was taken to an underground prison and i will explain the context of this a little later but he was taken to an underground prison and asked about the escape of his mother and brother and he didnt have good answers. He was very afraid and very confused and so at one point in that underground prison he was taken to room that looked like a machine shop. He was stripped and hung upside down from his ankles and his wrist with his clothes off. And andy card was brought in with a coal fire and the flames bellows from the flames and flames came out. The cart was rolled underneath his body and he was burned as they asked him questions. And he passed out. Cspan what were the extent of his injuries from not . Guest they are still visible. He has terrible burn marks on his lower back and the most severe burn you would get from being held over a fire. He had other marks on his body from other events and he has the middle finger of his right hand cut off at the first knuckle when he was 22 23. He was working in a military uniform factory inside the camp. He was fixing sewing machines and working with the groove seamstresses. He dropped a sewing machine and they got real mad because sewing machines are very valuable and would be more valuable than the human beings that fixed them. They took a table and hacked off part of his vigorous punishment. Almost immediately and he has scarring on his legs from where he was hung upside down in that prison as part of the torture to get them to talk about the escape of his mother and brother. And when he escaped the camp he called went to a highvoltage fence and his leg came in contact with the lowest brand and it burned his legs from his knees to his ankles on both legs. The scars are really horrible. Cspan when he escaped the camp and went to china and what year was that . Guest that was in 2005. Cspan how did he get inside of the camp and the firstplace . Guest he was born there. His crime was to be born and his parents were there for reasons that are almost as flimsy. His father was in the camp because his fathers brothers after the korean war had fled south korea and after the authorities heard about that his father and his fathers many brothers and parents were all rounded up and taken to camp for teen and that is where shin was born. He didnt know why his mother was there. She never told him and he never asked. They didnt have the kind of relationship where they would talk. His parents, his mom and dad conceived him because they were chosen by the guards for something called a reward marriage. And shin was bred like a farm animal in the camp and raised by this mother. He was physically his mother gave birth to him but he was raised with the values of the rules of the guards and was not close to his mother at all. He had to memorize rules of the camp most of which ends by saying if you dont do this you will be shot immediately in the first rule of the camp the most important rule is if you try to escape yuli shot immediately. The corollary to that rule is if you hear about an escape and dont report