Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

by Barbara Demick

But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.

How do you tell a mother her child needs more food when there is nothing more to give?

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.