It’s known that North Korea has concentration camps. Now comes testimony that it also has gas chambers. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reports:
“I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter.” The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country’s largest concentration camp.
His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. “The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.”
Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by what he saw.
“I felt that they throroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.”
Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.
“An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,” she testified. “One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead.”