Not Auschwitz, but Mauthausen

This was Mauthausen. I want you to remember the word… I want you to know, I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this. This was no movie. No printed page. Your son saw this with his own eyes and in doing this aged 10 years. – Fred Friendly, May 14, 1945

I’ve been reading witness testimonies about the horrors of North Korea’s concentration camps for years now, but after re-reading Chico Harlan’s story in The Washington Post last week, I was roused from my desensitization again:

At Yodok, perpetually famished prisoners sometimes participated in Olympic-style games, ordered as amusement for agents from the “integrity department.” Those agents, according to Jeong’s testimony, sent prisoners on 2.5-mile downhill races to retrieve corn cakes at the bottom.

“Many prisoners fell off the cliff while hustling and jostling on the way,” the report says, “and the integrity department agents considered this as a spectacle or entertainment.”

Tell me how, aside from geography, Yodok is not Mauthausen:

The SS guards would often force prisoners — exhausted from hours of hard labour without sufficient food and water — to race up the stairs carrying blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would often be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff known as “The Parachutists Wall.” At gun-point each prisoner would have the option of being shot or pushing the prisoner in front of him off the cliff.

I’ve learned to hate the words “never again” the way I’ve learned to hate other lies.

Those who died from infectious disease, starvation or labor were often not immediately buried, according to Kim. Rats devoured the corpses’ eyes, ears and genitals, “making them impossible to recognize.”

Eventually, the bodies were dumped into a “large steel furnace in a place inside the camp called ‘Bulmangsan’ and burned … with logs.”

If Human Rights Watch had existed in the 1930s, a member of their Board of Directors would have hosted a Leni Riefenstahl film festival. I don’t know what else to infer from the fact that a member of its Board recently hosted a Kim Jong Il propaganda exhibition.