In a new report on North Korean prison camps, one of the judges, a former child survivor from Auschwitz, said the conditions were as bad—or even worse—than what he witnessed in the Nazi concentration camps.
The report shared by the IBA (International Bar Association) War Committee offers chilling details from personal testimonies, video, transcripts and scholarly works about the state of North Korea’s prison camps.
We share these facts to help you understand the severe mistreatment, injustice and abuse many of our brothers and sisters in Christ are subjected to, daily, within North Korea’s infamous prison camp system.
Here are five facts from the report:
1) There are an estimated 80,000 – 130,000 political prisoners held in North Korea’s prison camps.
2) Inside the camps, prisoners are often “tortured and killed on account of their religious affiliation, with officials instructed ‘to wipe out the seed of [Christian] reactionaries.’ ”
3) In one account, guards killed a prisoner’s newborn baby by feeding it to the guard dogs.
4) The report also explains the fact that routine public executions are carried out in front of both children and adults, “designed to subdue the prison population.”
5) In another case, the prison guards executed starving prisoners “found digging for edible plants on a mountainside.”
There were many more cases reported of inhumane treatment, deliberate starvation, cruelty, abuse, rape, forced abortions and murder. Some of the details in the report are too graphic to share.
As hard as it is to read—or even imagine—this is a reality. We can’t afford to look away from this—or to let our Christian family in North Korea feel isolated and alone.
Join us in prayer for justice in North Korea. Ask God to give North Korean believers who are inside these camps the courage and power they need to stay strong and faithful to Him in the midst of unimaginable conditions. Ask God to strike the hearts of North Korean leaders—and for vast change in the nation’s treatment of its people. And pray for God’s Kingdom to expand on the Korean peninsula like never before in history.
Thank you for standing with your persecuted family in North Korea.
