Kang Chol Hwan

This is what Kang Chol Hwan remembers from when he was 10 years old: “The key was to take advantage of the fall, when fruits and vegetables could still be found, to consume — like bears in hibernation — enough to get through the winter. That’s the most important thing I learned … There was no other way to survive.” At 10, Kang and his family had already spent a year in Yodok, a North Korean labor camp, sent there because his grandfather, a manager at a state-owned agency, had been accused of disloyalty to the regime of the late dictator Kim Il Sung, father of current strongman Kim Jong Il. Kang’s task was to help bury those who died, usually of hunger or untreated ailments. The work was grim, but, he later recalled, it offered a “very practical advantage: the burial team could strip the corpse of its clothes and either reuse them or barter them.” Kang would not be released till he was 19.

In 1992, Kang escaped into China and made his way to South Korea. Two years later he wrote a book about Yodok. The Aquariums of Pyongyang was historic because it was the first account of the North’s gulag system by someone who had survived it. “One day Kim [Jong Il] and the regime and all that goes with it — the repression, the hunger, the prison camps — will collapse,” says Kang, now a 38-year-old journalist in Seoul. His triumph was to lay bare the horror of that regime. As the world weighs how to deal with the North’s nuclear ambitions, Kang’s insight has never been more chillingly pertinent.