Kang Chol Hwan on the plight of North Koreans
Kang Chol Hwan is a former North Korean prisoner and author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang.
The plight of North Koreans today, Kang says, is “very similar to that of Jews during World War II. Hitler and Kim Jong Il are very similar,” he says. “The methods of killing are different, but everything else is the same. When I see photos of the Jewish genocide, my heart just breaks.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and member of the North Korea Freedom Coalition, suggest a more accurate parallel would perhaps be Joseph Stalin — “he built the gulag.”
“Stalin, ultimately the worst dictator probably of the 20th century, said that one death is a tragedy and that a million deaths is a statistic.
“Take the power of one girl, Anne Frank, whose name, for so many millions around the world, is more than just a statistic from the Nazi Holocaust. I’m not making a direct comparison between Anne Frank and Mr. Kang, but I am saying that having someone as a symbol is enormously important.”
[From “A View From Inside” by Grace E. Jang, published in KoreAm Journal]
Tags: gulag, Kang Chol Hwan, north koreaThis entry was posted in DPRK Government, North Korean refugee, Prison Camps by Grant Montgomery.
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[…] Northern California trip with dissidents Park Sang Hak, who launches the weather balloons, and Kang Chol-Hwan, who smuggles in the DVDs, comes just days after the United Nations condemned the North Korean […]
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[…] “Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract, the book is a record of one man’s triumph over unbelievable adversity to expose the truths of North Korea to the modern world.” This entry was posted in North Korean refugee, Prison Camps by Grant Montgomery. Bookmark the permalink. […]
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[…] of the speakers was Kang Chol-hwan, a defector who escaped from North Korea in 1992, after spending ten years in the Yodok […]
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Thank you for providing such a powerful explanation.
This post actually made me cry.