After 20 years behind the razor wire of North Korea’s most brutal prison, a defector has described a life of nightmarish violence and terrifying isolation from the outside world.

Until his escape in 2005 Shin Dong Hyuk had been a prisoner all his life: innocent of any crime, but born behind bars. Bearing the thick scars of his ordeal, Shin Dong Hyuk’s account of Total Control Camp No 14 reveals perhaps the darkest side of Kim Jong Il’s communist dictatorship – a labour camp where tens of thousands of political prisoners are subjected to torture, beatings and execution.

Mr Shin’s parents were both prisoners – inmates allowed to marry as a reward for good behaviour and back-breaking toil in the fields.

At the age of 12 Mr Shin was summoned to watch the hanging of his mother and the shooting of his older brother. Beside him, his father wept.

Mr Shin, whose life was moulded by the regime’s guilt-by-association policy towards the relatives of political prisoners, had only one emotion. “I was furious with them,” Mr Shin, now 22 and living in South Korea, recalled. “As a result of their crimes I was subject to torture. Since we were born, we were taught that our parents committed crimes and we were to work hard to wash off their sins as children of criminals.”

Mr Shin’s mother and brother were killed for attempting to escape. As additional punishment Mr Shin was tortured over an open flame. A hook was gouged into his groin and he was thrown into a cell with an elderly inmate.

In a book that chronicles his life, Mr Shin describes being nursed back to health by the old man, who shared his tiny food rations and tended the boy’s injuries. It was the only affection Mr Shin had received from another human being. “I will never forget him,” Mr Shin wrote. “I came to love him more than my parents.”

The camp’s 60,000 inmates were indoctrinated to spy on each other. Inmates, said Mr Shin, lived with no information about the world. Even propaganda from the North Korean regime itself was denied. Mr Shin had never even heard of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il - deified elsewhere in the nation – before his escape.

Human rights groups estimate that as many as 200,000 political prisoners suffer in secret labour camps in North Korea’s mountains. Mr Shin is the first person who was born and raised in a camp to make it to South Korea.

In 2004 he befriended a prisoner who had escaped to China but been recaptured. He told Mr Shin of the outside world. The knowledge consumed him. On January 2, 2005, while collecting firewood he escaped, lacerating his legs on electrified barbed wire. He reached China and found asylum at South Korea’s Shanghai consulate.

Even groups who monitor human rights abuses in North Korea were stunned by Mr Shin’s account: “We didn’t believe it,” said Kim Sang Hun, head of Seoul’s Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights, who debriefed and now cares for Mr Shin. “It took many months before we were convinced he was what he said was.” Asked what message he would like to send Kim Jong Il, Mr Shin quietly said: “I’d ask him to try living in the camp for just one hour.”

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