Thoughts on Camp 14

Often my dad comes home from work and announces to me that he has a movie or video clip that he just has to show me. I've learned to roll my eyes a little, because at times, the video fails to live up to his  schoolboy excitement. However, I have learned to pay attention to what his shows me, because sometimes he comes across an unbelievable story...this happened last week.

My dad pulled me into the living room and cued up our TV to show me a 14 minute "60 Minutes" news story: 

This is a story about Kaechon internment camp, commonly called Camp 14, a slave labor camp in North Korea for political prisoners. The camp is located 50 miles from North Korea's capitol, Pyonyang and is considered a modern day concentration camp. The 15,000 captives in Camp 14 are prisoners for life and work in houses, factories, fields and mines each day in constant starvation. Shin Dong-hyuk is believed to be the only person to have successfully escaped from the camp back in 2005 when Shin was 23. Shin was born in the camp and his family was kept separated within the camp. When asked if he knew what love was Shin replied, "I still don't know what that means." He says the prisoners were allowed to take breaks to watch fellow prisoners get executed. Shin considered these times a welcomed escape from the grueling labor and hunger he monotonously faced. Prisoners ate rats to survive. Shin believes his father and grandfather were sent to Camp 14 because two of Shin's uncles defected to South Korea during the Korean War. The majority of people in the internment camps in North Korea are the children of people considered to be political dissidents, yet North Korea denies it has any political prisons. This is only a taste of the 60 Minutes story about Shin's life and escape; again, please view the video from the link above.

After watching the story, I was shocked and saddened, of course. But I also felt confused. So often I feel like the world we live in is really small. I can Skype a friend across the globe, send an email nearly anywhere and I all too often hear stories from people who unexpectedly run into friends while on trips across seas. 

But this video made the world seem too big and too foreign to me.

It upset me that I had never heard of Camp 14 before almost as much as the atrocities that were occurring in the camp. I realize injustices occur each day in all corners of the globe and also in Ripon. Too many children, parents, single adults and elderly face daily hunger, physical, verbal or emotional abuse and nagging physical ailments with no money to pay for medical services.

Then I think about this past Monday's Memorial Day commemorations I remember that we live in a county of free people where the majority of boys and girls are able to go to school and adults have services to help pay for medical care and food. And we live in a country where we celebrate those who serve our country in order that we can be free to express our beliefs, even when they do not align with our government's.

I don't know what we as Christians should do to help those in a country whose government doesn't even acknowledge the existence of its starving citizens. I feel pretty helpless. But I also can't remember a time in Sunday School or Confirmation where I learned we should ignore our neighbors in need. I think a prayer before bed is a good place to start.

This is a prayer from someone in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, a women's camp in Mecklenburg, Germany in WWII:

Peace to all those who are full of evil intent 
and an end to taking revenge 
and an end to speeches about punishment and scolding. 

The matchless cruelties defy description,
They exceed anything that may be learned, 
and the martyrs are numerous. 

Henceforth, o God,
don't weigh their sufferings on the scales 
of your justice, 
Don't ask for cruel reckoning,
but weigh it in a different way: 

Let the hangmen,
traitors and spies,
and all evil peoples benefit from their crime, 
and forgive them 
for the sake of courage and the sacrifice of the others. 
All good shall be reckoned, but evil spilt and lost. 

And in the remembrance of our enemies 
we shall not live as their victims,
not as their nightmares and terrible monsters, 
but rather come to their rescue,
that they abstain from their delusion. 

Only this will be claimed from them, 
and that we, when all this will be over, 
may live as humans among humans, 

and that peace may again reign on this poor earth 
for all with good in their heart 
and that this peace shall extend to the lost ones, too.
Amen