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thanking the American president for caring about their fate. I don’t have a slightest doubt that the good news has also traveled all across the country inside North Korea giving the 23 million people long-overdue hope and encouragement. For the 200,000 political prisoners in the gulag, the news must have struck them as if they had an encounter with the Savior himself. Some inside North Korea said that this single event could wipe out years of anti-American propaganda once and for all. And in South Korea, the effects have been most visible on the youth who have been uninformed and, therefore, indifferent to the plight of their fellow Koreans in the North.

As for me personally, meeting with President Bush gave me such a visibility that I have been bombarded with requests for one public speech after another. I have been speaking out about human rights violations in North Korea with hundred-fold empowerment ever since.

Furthermore, I’ve met with several members of the National Assembly in South Korea who all became acutely interested in the human rights issues in North Korea. South Korean Representative Kim Moon Soo has even begun a campaign to encourage South Koreans to read The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

As Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews, the world did not want to believe it was happening. No one wished to imagine that the smoke and ashes blown to the village by the wind, day in and day out, actually came from the burning of human bodies within the concentration camps. Only after the genocide of six million Jews came to its grisly end did mankind eventually confront this gruesome tragedy.

Now the term “concentration camp” has become inextricably linked to Hitler’s holocaust. But how on earth could I ever explain that the same—and in fact far worse—things are being repeated in this twenty-first century in North Korea, a relic of a failed experiment in human history called communism?

In my home country, 200,000 political prisoners are being ruthlessly massacred in concentration camps and countless people are routinely rounded up and sent off to them every day. As it was with Hitler’s Nazi Party, Pyongyang’s Korean Worker’s Party provides no explanation whatsoever to the silent lambs on their way to the slaughterhouse. Are we to stand back and allow history to repeat itself? If the disciples of Jesus were to maintain their silence when they were called upon to shout with conviction, the very stones would cry out!

I believe that the time has come for the collective conscience of our world to speak out against the barbarity of the Kim Jong Il regime. Sending a strong message to this outpost of tyranny will neither worsen nor prolong the sufferings of North Korean people. It will simply scare Kim Jong Il into stopping his cruelty. I am afraid that if we fail to restrain this madman sooner rather than later, the same mankind that let Hitler have his way will have to face God’s judgment once again for failing to fulfill its moral responsibility.

On behalf of all those who are unable to do so, I want to thank President Bush for sharing with me the pain of millions of my fellow North Korean people who have perished from starvation in that huge concentration camp known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I also want to thank the readers of this book who will partake with me of my kinsmen’s sufferings. To all those whose names I cannot remember or even pronounce who helped this book to be published, I pray God to reward each and every one of them amply. My special thanks go to Deborah Fikes, one name I cannot forget, and my wife, Yun Hye Ryeon.

Lastly, I invite all of us to an unceasing prayer vigil for the early departed and for a hastened liberation followed by true democracy in my homeland.

July 4, 2005

Seoul, South Korea

Kang Chol-Hwan is Co-Founder of the Democracy Network against the North Korean Gulag. www.nkgulag.org

INTRODUCTION

North Korea—the World’s Last Stalinist Regime

November 1999. Weighed down by jet lag and four hours of interviewing, I let myself be driven around in silence.