In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

by Yeonmi Park

Propaganda from my childhood was still embedded in my brain, and the feelings I was trained to feel could still pop up without warning.

It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth.

I was beginning to heal.

By simply telling my story, I had something to offer, too.

so did my sense of justice, and now I expected to study law. But I didn’t expect that within a year I would become an advocate for North Koreans who had no voice and no hope—the kind of person I had once been.

Or that the North Korean regime would denounce me as a “human rights puppet.”

His defiant letter to his former master made me wonder what kind of letter I might write to Kim Jong Un if I had the nerve.

was a human being and he didn’t own me anymore. Now I owned myself.

For the first time, North Korean leaders were being threatened with prosecution in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

It had never occurred to me that the regime would think I was important enough to be a threat.

I had risked my life to escape from North Korea, yet they were still trying to control me.

I felt, at least for that moment, that there was hope for all of us.

Now she recognized the potential impact of our story.

When the regime couldn’t dispute what I said, they invented lies about me and my family.

Worst of all, they paraded my relatives and former friends to denounce me and my family.

The story going around Hyesan was that his father, an agricultural expert, had been blamed by the regime for a disappointing harvest and had been sent to one of the brutal political prison camps.