is for -- his first memory at the age of around four was going with his mom to a place near where he grew up in the camp to watch somebody gets shot. and shooting, public executions in the camp were held every few weeks, and they were a way of punishing people who violated can't rule, and the terrorizing the 20-40,000 people who lived in the camp to obey the rules from then on. >> you said in a book you've been to north korea once. did you get to see a camp? >> nobody has been to a camp, other than north korean guards and officials, the people who go to them and almost never come out. there are now five or six of these camps, and they contain between 150-200,000 prisoners. with the exception of one camp,

they are no exit places, where one goes if you are believed over imagine by the north korean government of having done something wrong, of having been a wrongdoer or a wrong finger. and you go there -- wrong finger. you go there without trial, usually taken away at night and you stay there for the rest of your life. and very often you go with kids and with your parents. i was at a conference yesterday on a concentration camp and the latest information i is that haf of the people in the camps now are believed to be just a relative of wrong doers or wrong thinkers. so collective guilt is very much a part of this system. and reasoned the camps exist that have existed for more than 40 years is because they are an instrument of terror, of the kim

family dynasty. what they do is they put away those who might cause trouble, and they terrorize a 23, 24 million people in the country to not even think about causing trouble. to that and they've been pretty darn successful. north korea has been the longest lasting totalitarian state in the world's history. >> we have a google map shot of north korea. you can see on their the line of china. above. when you were there, you say in your book you are 29 people there. what do you remember? what is in your minds eye about north korea, and where did you go to? >> going to north korea is not a good way to report about north korea. i went along with a group of about 600 westerners when the

new york philharmonic went to pyongyang at the invitation of the government for a special concert. and like almost all western visitors warehouse and a high rise hotel on an island in pyongyang and taken to various places that they want to show off, statues, a simile halls, grand avenues, the subway. and then we were taken to the airplane and left about two and a half days later. so my understanding of north korea based on that trip is, is, that the country is bizarre and full of white concrete and very immaculate address to guards. but that's not the reality of north korea. the way t you find out about the reality of north korea him and it's increasingly easy for a border to do it, is to go to

seoul in south korea where the are now close to 30,000 defectors from south korea, almost all of whom have arrived in the past 10 years. and you can talk to them him and they are far the best sources of what it's like to live in that country and how difficult it is to get out. there are now 60 former camp inmates and former guards, a total, who've been interviewed by human rights groups who have given a very detailed nuanced and really credible picture of what goes on in the camps, and that picture in the words has been supplemented by an increasingly detailed satellite images of all the camps. >> 23 million in north, how many in the south? >> more than 50. more than 50 million. 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, very high rate. in fact, the highest rate in the world now. it's a high pressure, 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. it deals with north korea because it must, because it's a troublemaking neighbor. >> if my memory is correct we lost 50,000 americans in the korean war back in the early '50s. what was that more about? what was south korea been

compared to north korea? >> they were both poor and they were both recovering from the ravages of world war ii. that war, the united states divided the peninsula in the wake of world war ii, between north and south. and the south was a military dictatorship aligned with the united states. and the north was a military dictatorship aligned closely with russia. kim ill song was the leader who emerged in north korea. and he, over a period of 10 years greater they called the person out i'm so. came off as a state after a stolen state. and the invaded south korea in 1951. and made some real progress across south greater it was a

counter attack by u.s.-led forces and united nations forces and then over the course of three years they fought to a stalemate. and the same line was returned and north korea and south korea been divided ever since. north korea remained allied with russia and with china, and, but north korea developed a brand of totalitarian leadership that became increasingly isolated and increasingly cool as time went by. can ill song was a popular leader. he had -- kim il-sung was a popular view. get real grass roots 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 jong-il, was less popular

didn't 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-un, who is 28, 29 years old, and interests and is about the same age as the hero of my book, he -- it's unclear how popular he will be, or even if he is in control at this point. >> will come back to your hero of this book, shannon, after i show you some video from our first book interview back in 1991 as to why you like to travel. >> i went to school, what the

college and i read i get interested in faraway lands. i remember as a kid in college, i didn't believe this. i really didn't. sometimes i go to bed thinking walter cronkite and other people will put together a big elaborate perception that they are photographing sex animal outside of what i knew wasn't there. and i've always wanted, particularly in africa, to go to see if it was there. >> do you remember saying that? >> i do, yes. and i didn't think that. you know, i sort of spent my life proving myself wrong, proving my college itself wrong by traveling and being a foreign correspondent. >> when we talk to you, you're at the washington post and you wrote a book about africa and that's what we're talking about. since then, where have you lived? >> in eastern europe.

i was there for the collapse of communism and the yugoslav wars, which is really interesting mix because one was a story full of joy and hope and reconciliation, you know, the prague's, the prague revolution where intech slovakia people came out by the hundreds of thousands and listened to incredible speeches, and left the main square and didn't even step on the flower bed. it was a wonderful, joyous thing to do and to be part of. and then the yugoslavs crackup came and it was a horrible mess that americans didn't understand. incredibly dangerous. it went on for a long time. i did not see it all through. i left about halfway, two-thirds of the way through it, and came home and wrote a book about another subject. and felt terrible guilt. and actually some post-traumatic

stress, because i spent a lot of time in sarajevo and the taken a lot of risk and a didn't think that i'd done a good job, the bad guys are winning when i left. so that was, it was a very strange assignment from joy to really heartbreak. >> in 1995 you were talking about a book on the columbia river. i think this is -- let's watch this clip. we were on the bus at the time. >> i was born there, and i grew up there. >> have you been back lately? >> i spent most of 1993 and part of 94 they're working on a book about the columbia river, which is a big environmental problem out there. it's been damned to death and the salmon have been too large degree wide out. and there's a huge public policy debate. what's interesting about the place was that my family went there. in fact, i was born in the town the year that water was diverted from the columbia river to

irritate the forms around the town. and my family and my ability to go to college all depended on destroying the river. that's what the story is about. >> moses lake washington is where? >> it's in the columbia basin, almost in the middle of washington state. and it was a desert as they built grand coulee dam and other dams and diverted water from the kalinga river and turned that desert into a very productive farm area. that's where i was born. >> so you left eastern europe and went, came back here, and then where did you go? >> i went to "the new york times" for four years and covered, i was a roving national correspondent and also i did stories about africa and eastern europe for the magazine. and i went back to the post which is the mothership as all the editors called and it really was the place that had hired me

when i was young, when i first -- so i went back and then i went up to cover the american west for the "washington post" from 2003-2007. and then he said to you want to go to asia? and i said, i don't know. my wife said, yes, we should go. so we went with our little daughter and son. and we were there until 2010. >> where did you live over there? >> in tokyo. the post always had its debut in tokyo. but when i went to japan my boss, david hoffman, who has been the boss of the foreign correspondents at the post, he said you are a feature writer. you're good at that. why don't you do something that's hard? something that you probably don't want to do. he said i want you to write about north korea. i want you to bash your head against that story and tell it something you. tell us how it works.

and if you fail, that's fine, but if you don't try i'm going to be very unhappy. and so i started to work on that. >> this book, escape from count 14, has on the cover a picture of this band, shin. who is a? >> he is a survivor and he escaped in 2005. as far as we know, he is the only individual on earth board in those camps to get out and help what it's like to grow up in the camp. >> where did you get the idea to do a book about in? >> i interviewed him in 2008, and wrote a story that was on the front page that really resulted in an incredible emotional reaction from readers. they wanted to know more about him, about the camps. they wanted to give you money and save his soul. and so i went back to him a few weeks after that piece came out and i said, look, let's do a

book. let's dig into everything you know about that camp and i got out of there and what it was like to walk across north korea. and he didn't trust me and he didn't want to do it. so i begged him for nine months, and human rights groups who have become familiar with this story said, you should cooperate because this will further your goals, which is to make the world aware of what goes on in these camps, and also it well, yeah, maybe create some sort of governmental pressure in the united states so that human rights becomes at the top of the agenda when they deal with north korea. >> you made an arrangement with them about the money? >> we split the money even, and that was important to him because he wanted, he doesn't have any money, and he really doesn't have any business other than being a survivor of this camp.

and then we started to work on it. >> where did you get the idea that he even had a storied? >> well, i knew he had a store because a friend of mine who has become a very close friend, lisa, 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 to talk t to her and went to seoul and have lunch with him. that resulted in a newspaper story. >> how did you do with the language? >> it's really interesting, the language, because i don't speak korean and he does not speak anything other than korean. so i had a series of translators. we did interviews in seoul. we did more interviews in so that we did interviews in southern california then we did interviews in seattle and then we also did hundreds of e-mails. i want to show this picture.

spent what was the circumstance of there? >> this wasn't one of our weeks of interviews in seoul. that was in 2009. >> how to argue and how tall is he? >> i am 6'1", or lease a used to be and he is about 5'6", maybe 55 of that. he is stunted from malnutrition and his arms are bowed from childhood labor. most of the male population of north korea is stunted from malnutrition. we males come to south korea, now there are about 30,000 of them, they are on an average now, according to the south korean government, more than five inches shorter than the south korean contemporary. that's an amazing statement about the nutrition and north korea. >> where is he did a?

>> today he is in washington. because we are promoting a book. but he has moved about six, seven months ago from the united states back to seoul where he is doing some web broadcasting with some young human rights friends and he invites other defectors on to talk about north korea. >> so the translation was expensive? >> no, it wasn't that expensive. a lot of people care about shin dong-hyuk, and they care about is store and want to get it out. i had really good of translators in, some of them worked for the "washington post" in seoul, but the most important translator was a young guy named david kim who is a friend of shin and his family befriended him.

david cam offered to be a translator. david kim is a graduate of young i. is now at northwestern law school, and he is incredibly smart and he is really multilingual in idiomatic american english as well as he speaks korean with his parents who don't speak much english. and he's a good friend. so he did all of the translating in southern california, which is were i did the bulk of the reporting and where she and really opened up to me after a year. >> where is this picture from? >> this is taken from the group house in torrance, california, where shin was living and working for a group called liberty of north korea, which is a human rights group, link, which helped bring shin to the united states in 2009. and where he was an unpaid volunteer.

they gave him housing in this group house, and he lived there, depending on the time, but between 12 and 25 people lived in the house. mostly people younger than him. >> how old is he did a? >> he is 29. >> you've got a lot of torture stories in this book. go to the one, out of context, but just so people can understand how far it went with him, the story about him being put over the flame. >> when he was 13 years old he was taken to an underground prison, and i'll explain the context for this oliver later. but he was taken to an underground prison and asked about the escape plans of his mother and brother. and he didn't have good answers. he was very afraid, very confused. and so at one point in that underground prison he was taken

into the room that looked like a machine shop. he was stripped and hung upside down from his ankles and his wrists with his clothes off in a kind of "u." a card was brought in with a coal fire and the flames, but was put on the flames and flames came up. the card was rolled underneath his body and he was burned as they asked him questions. and he passed out. >> what with the extent of his injuries from that? >> well, they are still visible. he has terrible burn marks on his lower back and buttocks, a most severe burn that you would get from being held over a fire. he has other marks on his body from other events. he has, the middle thing of his right hand was cut off at the first knuckle when he was 22,

23. he was working in a military uniform factory inside the camp. >> seamstress speaks yesterday was fixing sewing machines and working with seamstress. he dropped a sewing machine and they got real mad because sewing machine are very valuable, more valuable than the human beings who fixed them. they grabbed him, to go to a table and hacked off part of his finger as punishment. >> right there. >> right there, almost immediately. he has scoring on his legs from when he was hung upside down in that prison as part of the torture to get him to talk about the escape of his mother and his brother. and when he escaped the camp, he called -- he crawled through a high-voltage fence and his legs came in contact with the lowest strand and a burned his legs from his knee to his ankle on

both legs. and the scars of their a really horrible. >> your pocket when he escaped the camp and went to china. >> yes. >> what year was that? >> that was in 2005. >> how did he get inside this camp in the first place? >> he was born there. is 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 others brothers, after the korean war -- korean war, had fled south greater after the authorities hard about that, his father and his father's many brothers and parents were all rounded up and taken to camp 14. and that's where shin was born. he doesn't know why his mother was there. she never told him, and he never asked. they didn't have the kind of

relationship where they would talk. his parents, his mom and dad, conceived him because they were chosen by the guard is something called a reward of marriage. and shin was bred like a farm animal in the camp and raised by his mother. and he was, physically his mother gave birth to him but he was raised with the values and the roles of the guards and was not close to his mother at all. he had to memorize 10 rules of the camp, most of which end by saying that if you don't do this you will be shot immediately. and the first rule of the camp, the most important rule is if you try to escape, you will be shot immediately. and the corollary to that rule is if you hear about an escape and don't report it, you will be shot immediately. and these were basically his 10 commandments, his ethical

guideposts as the little guy growing up in the camp. >> let me read the rest of us can quickly so that people can understand what the rules of the camp were. they almost all have will be shot immediately if they're caught doing this. the first one with do not try to escape a second one, no more than two pressures can meet together. third one, do not steal. fourth, guards must be obeyed unconditionally. five, anyone who sees a fugitive or suspicious figure most proper reporting. six, prisoners must watch what another report any suspicious behavior immediately. seven, prisoners must more than fulfill the work assigned event each day. eta, the on the workplace there must be no intimate link between the sexes for personal reasons. nine, prisoners must genuinely repent of their heirs. and prisoners of the laws and regulations of the camp will be shot immediately. was a really shot immediately? >> they were shot often, and shin was one of, the only forms

of entertainment in the camp, i knew what people actually get together to watch something was an execution. and so the rules were taken very seriously. particularly by the kids who saw the results of disobedience very clearly. >> with the first execution that shin -- >> it was the one that begins the book when he was four years old. >> how does he remember anything at th this stage? >> i said, what's your first memory? and he said, i remember going with the crowd of people with my mom and being very excited because it was the first time he had ever been around a crowd of people. the rules of the camp is that you don't spend time with a lot of people. so that's what i think triggers

his memory is that you never been in a crowd of people. he had never heard this sort of hubbub of people whispering and being close together in a big crowd, of many thousands of prisoners. >> what's this about putting marbles in their mouth when they are shot? >> that is a very common practice. i've talked to three others who saw this happen. and they do it so that people don't announce the guards or particularly the leadership of the country. they are just coming in, they can't say anything. it's rocks actually. >> rocks, and they put it over them and -- >> sometimes they put a hood on the. sometimes they don't. >> what about his parents? what did he see with the death of his parents and his brother? >> the real heart of this book, and the psychological trauma of the rest of his life comes out

of the escape and of his mother and brother. and what happened is when he was 13 he was living in a boarding school, which was all kids leave their parents at 12 and go to live with other kids in a boarding school. >> in at the camp? >> in the camp. this is only a couple blocks actually from where his mom was thing. shin had been in the boarding school for a while. on a friday night his teacher, a guard, a guy who wore a gun, told him, you go home and stay with your mom tonight. you can do that. and shin didn't want to because he didn't particularly like his mom, but he did it because he was told he. so we went home and when he went on that night his brother was also at the house. this is very unusual because his brother also lived away from home. he lived in a concrete factory, which was about a mile and half inside the camp spent his brother was eight years older than he was.

>> and shin harding and his his brother. he knew he was but he had no relationship with him. so they had supper. the supper that he had eaten, the only meal he had ever been in his life which was salt, corn and cabbage. that's all, that was breakfast, lunch and dinner spent how do you eat so? >> well, they put salt in soup, cabbage soup and corn. that's the kind of girl and -- gurule. that's the primary thing of them small animals the catch in the camps like mice mraps. but this meal was that classic meal. he had the new. he went to sleep in this house they lived in -- >> it had us in the kitchen and one bedroom. and the center kitchen was with three other units besides the room where the mother slow. we went into the bedroom, fell asleep and he was awakened i this conversation of his mother and brother about midnight.

and he heard them talking, and he crawled and looked at and he also saw that his mother was cooking rice for his brother. rice is something that hardly exists at all in the camp, but it's grown their own some people, some farm workers and steal it but and his mom worked in the form at the camp so she must have stolen some overtime and was making rice. she never made rice for him. he was really jealous. he was 13. ..

and then he heard his mother countenancing that conversation about the escape. he listened for a while and the rice said shrice she was cookind for flight for him to take and eat after he got out of the ca camp. he got up and told his mom he had to go to the bathroom and went out and found a guard and reported them. first he went to a classmate and said what should i do i it witha classmate said we should report them and they went together. when they reported this a scape

he was thinking how can i turn this to my advantage and so he asked howard if he could have more food as a result of his snitching and he could also be made a class leader position that would allow him to do less work, take fewer beatings and maybe have more food as well. the guard said sure. no problem. the guard called at the superiors and told shin to go to bed in the school he lived. the next morning, he was awakened and told there were guards waiting for him. they put a blindfold on him outside the school and drove him off to this underground prison inside the camp which before that he did not know existed and he was taken inside and then he was interrogated. he went thinking they would see him as a good snitch so they

started asking questions about his involvement and he was frightened and confused and he didn't answer in any coherent way for the first two rounds of interrogation which included the torture that i told you about. and in the third interrogation because he had been burned so badly lying on the floor in his cell he told them i've done a good job. i turned in my mother. you can check this out with my classmate that i told him that they did check it out and shin was allowed to recover in that underground prison and then he was taken out after seven months. he was taken back to the same officers who had originally interrogated him and he came out and saw his father with him and his father have also been tortured and looked horrible. his father's leg had been broken

in his father could hardly move, hardly walk. then they were both taken together with blindfold on back to the execution grounds. the placat the place he first rs from when he was four. he had his blindfold taken off and thought they are going to kilwere going tokill me now. and he was terrified that he was about to be shocked that he took his father, helped his father to the room and helped shin to the front of the room. >> what's really interesting about this is that when his mom came out she was put on a makeshift right in front of him and she was not blindfolded, a hood wasn't over her face and she tried to catch her sons i and he hated her for the horror

that he went through in this underground prison and he refused to catch her i and she was hanged in front of him and then his brother was shot in the head three times by the guards. and the then steve again went bk into the population as a 14-year-old. >> cspan >> cspan: what happened to his father or? >> guest: his father lost his job as an operator. he began to work as a common laborer living around the camp and a shin had a very strange relationship after this execution. his father tried to say i'm sorry that we were so selfish as to the children in the camps and that yo you have to live through this and i hope sometime you can get out of here and he said i don't care what you say and he rarely saw him. >> cspan: is he alive?

>> guest: he staked a decade later when he was 23. the year that he escaped was 2005. >> cspan: how did he escape? >> guest: the escape is a very important part of the book. one thing i want to say about the experience of the execution is that shin was raised in such a way that he didn't really love his mother and didn't have feelings of affection, trust towards his father or his brother. and i first asked him about those things how could you hate your mother and not look her in the eye and a basic thes they se people were competitors with me for food. and if they do nothing for me that was useful as he saw it. >> cspan: without god? >> guest: this was a concept

that he heard about when he got to south korea. but learning how to trust other people and learning to feel guilty for what he did with his mother is something that he has had to do since he got to south korea and the united states. he's seen other families and mothers and sons together and he has begun to feel terribly guilty about the kind of boy he was and what he did. >> cspan: does he know what happened to his father? >> guest: no. he assumes his father was tortured or killed as a result of his escape. >> cspan: is gaping to china was difficult for him in what way?

you said it's never happened before in a way that one and he escaped the camp. the authority since 1958 and nobody is known to have a scape date in 2005. so it is really hard to get out of there. and he did it because he met someone who inspired him to think of the outside world and i think this is sort of shin's birth as a human being. he was in the camp working in the sewing machine factory when he was assigned to work with an older guy who was i think in his early 40s and he had lived in pyongyang and had been educated in the former soviet union. he was a worldly nice guy and his job was to snitch on him because he proved himself as a

snitch over the years he did it with his parents and many other people but he started talking about the world and shin was interested in hearing the stories and then he started talking about something that shin was really interested in and that is food. the park liked to eat and talk about the joy and the wonder of grilled meat in china. you can get grilled chicken, beef and pork and you didn't even have to be rich. that's just the way people live outside. and that was a revelation that he couldn't get out of his imagination. he dreamed about and fantasized about eating well. he told him many other things that were news to him, that the world is round, that china

existed in south korea existed and the united states existed, that the leaders in north korea for a bunch of thieves, but none of that was very interesting to shin because he had no context. he had been hungry his whole life and he learned that he could just get out of his cage he could eat. >> cspan: camp 14 is how far from the chinese border or? >> guest: about 300 miles, and it's about 50 miles just north of pyongyang in the mountains of central north korea. >> cspan: what was the camp surrounded with? >> guest: it was a barbed wire fence between eight and ten barbed wire lines. this wasn't the kind of thing

where they jump but where it will grab you and it will tell you. that's the kind of fence it is. he got very excited and he said with a scape. he was okay with that idea. he met him two months before he decided to escape so this was all very sudden. he got very excited and they were really lucky because they were assigned on the first of the year to go to the fire close to the sense that wasn't near the guard towers with the guards looked down on the prisoners with weapons and they waited until late afternoon on january 2, 2005 until the dust

blowing life into the ring into words the fence. and in fact when they started to go he said let's go to park, and parks said i'm not so sure. a shin actually grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the fence and then he started to run. as they ran he slipped and fell in the snow on an icy part of the snow because it was cold and the middle of the winter. he shoved his torso between the first and second and was electrocuted and so fell dead on the fence and pulled at the bottom strand down. he crawled over his body and got most of the way across the fence in his leg slipped off on both sides and he got these terrible burns from the voltage. i talked to an expert on the

execution at the university of washington who deals with people who deal with power lines in the pacific northwest into this scenario that struck me as pretty weird it is not very believable he said it's completely believable that this would happen and it would be the only way that he needed that insulator rounding the voltage so that he could get through the fence without taking a lethal charge he was lucky to get the fed but it's not like winning the lottery. it's conceivable to do according to experts. they helped them get to the fence in a way that wouldn't be. once they should got through the

fence, he grew up out of there in the real world he was supposed to be outside and then arrange for the shipment to south korea but he was dead. >> cspan: after he got out of the prison how lonprison how loo get to china and then back to south korea? >> guest: it took a month. a month of walking, riding in trucks and one of the things that is interesting about the journey across north korea in the police state and they didn't know which way was north and it really is an incredibly lucky trip. but he had a couple things in his advantage. he was very smart and had a

common senshave acommon sense ol which is why he managed to survive in the camp and also was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. he didn't tell anybody that he's from the camp. he found some military clothes which he put up and this was in north korea. it's the most militarized society on earth with the million man army. it's actually 1.2 or 1.3 million people. it was no longer dressed like an inmate and instinctive he walked into the town and he looked very much like a box of young north koreans. he was skinny, he was wearing an

old military uniform and he didn't have much to do so a lot of unemployed people who drift around south korea in the week of 1990 when almost a million people died. when the food distribution system is informal and depends on the smugglers from china and farmers selling food from cooperative farms whe forms whee not supposed to but it's to come up with this sort of messy informal market system because it is the only way that people can eat. eat. there are estimates that 80 to 90% of the calories in the stomach of any north korea to come from the system now. so he fell into the system. he didn't know it existed but he was lucky. it was in a few days he'd broken into a house crystals and

closing the big bag of rice which he put in a backpack that he also stole and he walked past the market. they said we will give you money for it so he was given some and it was the first transaction with money a few weeks before the money existed he sold the rights and a few other things and assaults on other traders that were basically moving north towards china to do more trading. he fell in with them and that was the route out of china. >> cspan: lets go back to how you put this together. how many hours did you talk to shin? >> guest: i'm not sure how many hours, but it was -- i think we had seven sessions of interviews and four of those

sessions were weeklong sessions where they would start in the morning or the late afternoon. >> cspan: how did you document it? >> guest: document the interview? i recorded it all. brian mack on audio only? >> guest: i also took notes on the computer simultaneously. there's the question of verifying the story and it's a very important one. he lied to me about his role in betraying his mother. he didn't say that he betrayed his mother. he said they were executed and he saw it and the reason he didn't is because when you get to south korea he thought if he told that story government might arrest him and certainly other people would think of him as not human so he decided that he

would expedite his story a little bit and finally about a year into the interview he decided that he wanted to be the truth. he said the reason he did is because he was founded by people telling him the truth and who cared about him and he felt an obligation to tell the truth. >> cspan: when you see this photograph of him that was taken what do you see in that case from your knowledge of setting within. given the hardships of his life he has aged a little bit. when i met him just a couple years before that i swear he looked like he was a teenager and i saw him yesterday. he has a youthful look.

>> cspan: how has he changed? >> guest: he has become less wary and suspicious and a little bit more at peace with himself because he's told the truth of the betrayal of his mother. yesterday we were talking at a human rights convention and he talked about selling out his mother and what he hopes will come out of the truth. he wants people to know this is the kind of human beings they are trying to raise in camps. there'there's a human rights abf starving people that there's also that of raising children to be little monsters. >> cspan >> cspan: did you ever see them get mad at you? >> guest: he didn't want to talk about all this stuff. journalists just want to keep drilling. i said in the book it's like being a dentist and not using

anesthetics. it's painful and miserable. >> host: when you say in the book they could care less. >> guest: the reason people would be interested is a great story. it's an adventure story. it's also a psychological story because it's about how a person goes from having no human emotion to taking out that there a good idea and then developing it. the normal trajectory of the stories were of the concentration camp stories is you have someone that comes from a sophisticated and civilized family. they are taken to the camp and all of the other relatives were killed. they have to behave in a way to

survive and then they come out and tell their story about the dissent in the survival. shin's story is completely different because he was born in hell and thought it was home and the values that he learned there were what it was to be a human being and it's now discovered that the world and what it means to be a human being are completely different. >> cspan: why do they not care about the north koreans? >> guest: they've moved on as a culture and economy. their aspirations are for greater individual while, technological achievement and north korea that exists in the middle ages is a dead weight on those goals. most of the family ties between north and south korea have been attenuated by tim and weakened

by age. most of the people that have living relatives on their 60s, 70s and 80s so the actual connections are just falling apart. >> cspan: i ran into some germans the other day and i said how is it going in your country? we read how well you are doing. how about east of germany? they are doing very well. then he realized how much it costs. are they worried that it's going to cost them to pick up the 23 million people? >> guest: they are very worried. there've been lots of studies by economic consulting groups about the cost of that and there are estimates that it could cost three times as much in comparable dollars to have unification with the north because of the development problems in north korea. if you fly over the peninsula at night, north korea is life,

china is light and uc japan off to the right. it's just dark and north korea and that is a good symbol of the statstate of the development. there are very few road. education has largely collapsed. the place is a basket case run by a mother tries to state that survives because of a different china and sales of missiles to places like iran. >> cspan: you live where no? >> guest: i moved back to seattle after leaving tokyo. >> cspan: how old are your kids? >> guest: seven and nine. i met her on a blind date in new york city. >> cspan: and seattle, no more, "new york times"? >> guest: right. i took a guy out buy-out and

occasionally for frontline pbs. >> cspan: would have you done for frontline? >> guest: i worked about a line in alaska. >> cspan: you have another book in mind? >> guest: it is about the compromise in alaska or it might be about my father's generation. and i'm not sure. >> cspan: what do you expect shin to do? we haven't mentioned the couple from ohio. >> guest: he calls him his parents and they are very happy for that. they read the piece and 2008 and

above security. he hasn't had that from older people. >> cspan: why did they get into it so? >> guest: the north korea human rights advocates are devout christians and they just got interested in this guy. >> cspan: where do you expect him to end up? is about 30? >> guest: he's 29 now. i hope that he will use the money from this book to get a little bit more education. i would hope to learn english and to pursue his dream as a human rights advocate on north korea and other issues. it's not as everyone hoped in terms of the education language for training psychotherapy. he is his own individual person,

but he is now doing this webcasting and south korea and he's very excited about it and he's in a much better place now than when i met him in 2008 and he is thrilled that this book is selling in the united states and people are learning and that is the goal. that's the reason he went through. >> cspan: our guest has been blaine harden and his book is called "escape from camp 14" one man's remarkable odyssey from north korea to freedom. thank you very much. >> guest: thank you.

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