Escape From Camp 14 Discussion Questions
Chieko Boteler
There is a turning point in Shin's relationship to his family when he discovers his mother sharing their precious resources with his brother. He hates this, because he is so concerned with his own survival that he doesn't have enough family love to understand that if his brother and mother survive, that is also good for him. The contest symbolizes the intentional scarcity and the dysfunction that it causes in North Korean families when the government withholds resources.
Shin decides to rat out his mother and brother, having overheard them discussing an attempt to escape from their camp. This escape plan is illegal and Shin has been brainwashed through his entire education to tell someone if he ever hears anything even remotely negative about the government or about the camps. However, when he tells, something symbolic happens; he is betrayed by the guard. In the same way he vied for credit, the guard does too, putting him in prison and pretending that the guard himself discovered the attempted escape.
Shin meets an archetypal man who helps him in the prison. He is archetypal because he is a mysterious old man (clearly an archetype), and because he provides healing and direction to the broken-down and unhealthy young men in the camp. He is a pillar of direction and wisdom, helping to orient the youth so that they understand something about life other than what they were taught to believe in school.
In another clearly archetypal moment, Shin accidentally meets his own father in jail. This symbolically means that he has reached the depths of hell, because he is like Virgil's Aeneas who descends into Hades to encounter his father. Together, they work together to understand their fate, and to the reader, this symbolizes the ongoing, generational brokenness of North Korea. This is when he starts to feel like maybe he should change his mind about North Korea.
The final change that helps Shin to betray the government and escape is the death of his mother and brother who are executed in front of the whole camp. The government makes a statement through their death that disorder and escape are not options for the camp prisoners. This leads Shin to understand why they were attempting to escape in the first place, and in the end, their deaths are also symbolized in the dead body he vaults (because in both cases, he was spying against them for the government, and in both cases, they attempt escape).
Kim seized property from its owners, forced his people into labor camps, and leaves the populace hungry... even after being provided with aid (the United States being on donor), the people of North Korea continue to go hungry.
Born Shin In Geun, Shin is the protagonist of the book. He was born in Camp 14, one of the many prison camps scattered across North Korea and because of this has no memories of a childhood outside of a camp environment. He was almost estranged...
While it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of Jewish victims, statistics indicate that the total was over 5,860,000. Six million is the round figure accepted by most authorities.
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While it is impossible to ascertain the exact number, the recognized figure is approximately 5,000,000. Among the groups which the Nazis and their collaborators murdered and persecuted were: Gypsies, Serbs, Polish intelligentsia, resistance fighters from all the nations, German opponents of Nazism, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, habitual criminals, and the "anti-social," e.g. beggars, vagrants, and hawkers.
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Every Jewish community in occupied Europe suffered losses during the Holocaust. The Jewish communities in North Africa were persecuted, but the Jews in these countries were neither deported to the death camps, nor were they systematically murdered.
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A death (or mass murder) camp is a concentration camp with special apparatus specifically designed for systematic murder. Six such camps existed: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka. All were located in Poland.
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While thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis or died as a direct result of discriminatory measures instituted against Jews during the initial years of the Third Reich, the systematic murder of Jews did not begin until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
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On November 14, 1935, the Nazis issued the following definition of a Jew: Anyone with three Jewish grandparents; someone with two Jewish grandparents who belonged to the Jewish community on September 15, 1935, or joined thereafter; was married to a Jew or Jewess on September 15, 1935, or married one thereafter; was the offspring of a marriage or extramarital liaison with a Jew on or after September 15, 1935.
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Those who were not classified as Jews but who had some Jewish blood were categorized as Mischlinge (hybrids) and were divided into two groups:
Mischlinge of the first degree--those with two Jewish grandparents.
Mischlinge of the second degree--those with one Jewish grandparent.
The Mischlinge were officially excluded from membership in the Nazi Party and all Party organizations (e.g. SA, SS, etc.). Although they were drafted into the Germany Army, they could not attain the rank of officers. They were also barred from the civil service and from certain professions. (Individual Mischlinge were, however, granted exemptions under certain circumstances.) Nazi officials considered plans to sterilize Mischlinge, but this was never done. During World War II, first-degree Mischlinge, incarcerated in concentration camps, were deported to death camps.
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The first measures against the Jews included:
April 1, 1933: A boycott of Jewish shops and businesses by the Nazis.
April 7, 1933: The law for the Re-establishment of the Civil Service expelled all non-Aryans (defined on April 11, 1933 as anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent) from the civil service. Initially, exceptions were made for those working since August 1914; German veterans of World War I; and, those who had lost a father or son fighting for Germany or her allies in World War I.
April 7, 1933: The law regarding admission to the legal profession prohibited the admission of lawyers of non-Aryan descent to the Bar. It also denied non-Aryan members of the Bar the right to practice law. (Exceptions were made in the cases noted above in the law regarding the civil service.) Similar laws were passed regarding Jewish law assessors, jurors, and commercial judges.
April 22, 1933: The decree regarding physicians' services with the national health plan denied reimbursement of expenses to those patients who consulted non-Aryan doctors. Jewish doctors who were war veterans or had suffered from the war were excluded.
April 25, 1933: The law against the overcrowding of German schools restricted Jewish enrollment in German high schools to 1.5% of the student body. In communities where they constituted more than 5% of the population, Jews were allowed to constitute up to 5% of the student body. Initially, exceptions were made in the case of children of Jewish war veterans, who were not considered part of the quota. In the framework of this law, a Jewish student was a child with two non-Aryan parents.
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This question is one of the most difficult to answer. While Hitler made several references to killing Jews, both in his early writings (Mein Kampf) and in various speeches during the 1930s, it is fairly certain that the Nazis had no operative plan for the systematic annihilation of the Jews before 1941. The decision on the systematic murder of the Jews was apparently made in the late winter or the early spring of 1941 in conjunction with the decision to invade the Soviet Union.
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The following groups of individuals were considered enemies of the Third Reich and were, therefore, persecuted by the Nazi authorities: Jews, Gypsies, Social Democrats, other opposing politicians, opponents of Nazism, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, habitual criminals, and "anti-socials" (e.g. beggars, vagrants, hawkers), and the mentally ill. Any individual who was considered a threat to the Nazis was in danger of being persecuted.
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The Jews were the only group singled out for total systematic annihilation by the Nazis. To escape the death sentence imposed by the Nazis, the Jews could only leave Nazi-controlled Europe. Every single Jew was to be killed according to the Nazis' plan. In the case of other criminals or enemies of the Third Reich, their families were usually not held accountable. Thus, if a person were executed or sent to a concentration camp, it did not mean that each member of his family would meet the same fate. Moreover, in most situations the Nazis' enemies were classified as such because of their actions or political affiliation (actions and/or opinions which could be revised). In the case of the Jews, it was because of their racial origin, which could never be changed.
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The explanation of the Nazis' implacable hatred of the Jew rests on their distorted world view which saw history as a racial struggle. They considered the Jews a race whose goal was world domination and who, therefore, were an obstruction to Aryan dominance. They believed that all of history was a fight between races which should culminate in the triumph of the superior Aryan race. Therefore, they considered it their duty to eliminate the Jews, whom they regarded as a threat. Moreover, in their eyes, the Jews' racial origin made them habitual criminals who could never be rehabilitated and were, therefore, hopelessly corrupt and inferior.
There is no doubt that other factors contributed toward Nazi hatred of the Jews and their distorted image of the Jewish people. These included the centuries-old tradition of Christian antisemitism which propagated a negative stereotype of the Jew as a Christ-killer, agent of the devil, and practitioner of witchcraft. Also significant was the political antisemitism of the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, which singled out the Jew as a threat to the established order of society. These combined to point to the Jew as a target for persecution and ultimate destruction by the Nazis.
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