Cruel Communist oppression didn't end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the collapse of the USSR. The horrors live on.

North Korea

 

Verne Strickland Blogmaster / Tuesday August 9, 2011

Escape From North Korea

Defection is daunting. So is starting a new, free life.

By Tom O'Neill

Photographs by Chien-Chi Chang

 

A frigid November day pressed against the windows of a shabby apartment building in the Chinese city of Yanji, ten miles from the North Korean border. Three stories up, footsteps stopped outside a door. At the sound, two young women hurried to a back room and shrank against a wall. Then came a knock. The women, defectors from North Korea, bowed their heads, expecting the worst. If the Chinese police found them without identity cards, they would be deported in handcuffs and chains. Back in North Korea, they would be sentenced to years of hard labor in a prison camp.

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