Inside North Korea

by Vollertsen, Norbert

• ISBN13: 9781893554870
• ISBN10: 1893554872
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-01-30
• Publisher: Encounter Books

Summary

In 1999, German physician Norbert Vollertsen joined a medical assistance group called German Emergency Doctors and was sent to North Korea. When he arrived in Pyongyang in the summer of 1999, it was the beginning of a forbidding personal odyssey through a "mad place." Vollertsen worked at several hospitals, orphanages and kindergartens in and around the capital city of Pyongyang. Then one day he offered to donate his own skin for a graft for a burn victim. As a result, he was awarded a "Friendship Medal" and given his own car and a VIP passport that allowed him to travel freely through the country. What he saw shocked him. The people had no water, no medicine, no sanitation. Eight- and nine-year-old children were forced to work at night to build a "Youth Hero Motorway." Mass starvation was used as a tool of political control. People everywhere were under surveillance, informed on by their own family members. Those who attempted to flee over the Chinese border or dissented from this brutal regime, particularly Christians, were tortured in concentration camps. Wh