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[NYP] The underground Christian network smuggling refugees out of N. Korea

June 8, 2015

 

North Korean workers planting seedlings on a field in Jaeryong, South Hwanghae Province, on Jan. 24, 2015. (KCNA/Yonhap)

North Korean workers planting seedlings on a field in Jaeryong, South Hwanghae Province, on Jan. 24, 2015. (KCNA/Yonhap)

[NEW YORK POST]

If such a thing as a normal childhood can be had in North Korea, Joseph Kim had it. He lived with his father, mother and older sister in Hoeryong, a city that benefits from being the birthplace of Kim Il-sung’s first wife.

There, young families had normal goods and services: a grocery store, a barber shop, an ice-cream parlor. At the end of each day, the neighborhood children would gather around the television and gorge themselves on popcorn and candy.

What Kim’s family did not know was that Hoeryong was, and remains, home to a maximum-security concentration camp, one of six the country is known to run.

As he writes in his new memoir, “Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Kim and his family believed that they wanted for nothing.

“We were all alike,” he writes, “one big North Korean family, or so it seemed to me.”

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