While reading "Escape from Camp 14," be prepared for horrifying passages that plumb the depths of viciousness to which both the jailed and their jailers in North Korea's political prison camps descend.
Bred for a lifetime of slave labor by prison camp guards who had rewarded his lifer parents' good behavior by matching them up for marriage, a 13-year-old boy overhears his mother and his older brother plotting to flee. He immediately rats them out. Required to attend their execution, he refuses to meet his mother's gaze.
A teacher — angered that the boy has snitched not to the teacher but to a guard, thus depriving the teacher of career points with the prison bureaucracy — enlists the whole class in a months-long campaign to beat the boy bloody and starve him.