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The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. By Cholhwan Kang & Pierre Rigoulot. Tr. Yair Reiner. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Paper. 238 p. $15.
The Aquariums of Pyongyang is a unique autobiography of a North Korean who grew up in his country's largest concentration camp, Yodok. Chol-hwan Kang recalls his childhood as a desperate struggle for survival in savage conditions: "By the time a group of prisoners finished working a field, no animal was left alive. Even earth worms were fair game" (104). According to Kang, the prisoners grunted and snorted at meals without talking, stole, lied, and clawed their way to survival: "The only lesson pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity for vice . . . . I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this optimism" (160). Yet Kang recalls moments of great beauty, friendship, and kindness out of the camps and later, he eagerly soaked up the forbidden Christian message of "love and respect for one's fellow man," which he remembers as "sweet as honey to us" (185).
The North Korean system of concentration camps is the all too familiar sign of totalitarian systems. The North Korean communist state started in 1948, along with concomitant firing squads, prisons, and terror. Yodok opened in 1959. Like many North Korean camps, Yodok was set up like a miniature county with 10 villages set within a large rural area about one day's walk across. Four of the camps were populated by "redeemables," like Kang and his family, who might be restored to society if they survived, and six camps with some 70...