Today's Holocaust

An interview came out today with a man who escaped from a North Korean concentration camp. He is one of only three people on earth who can boast this accomplishment.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in Camp 14, the labor camp for political dissidents located south of Pyongyang. Political dissent is punished to the third generation in North Korea. Shin lived the first twenty-two years of his life in utter oppression. He was raised by prison guards, not parents. He feasted on corn kernels found in cow dung, because this topped starvation. His mother and brother were executed before his eyes, but he felt no sense of guilt. He’d been raised by prison guards and had no sense of family; his only instinct was survival.

This report hit home for two reasons:
I skipped Western Civilization class today.
PHC is mobilizing to do something about this horror story.

We’ve reached World War II in our study of Western Civilization. A discussion of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany should not be separated from the study of World War II. Today the class watched a movie that showed in graphic and plain detail the human carnage of the Holocaust. Having been exposed to documentation of these atrocities multiple times, I took advantage of my professor’s willingness to excuse any absences from the showing of this movie. I already know that we cannot let a Holocaust occur again.

Two hundred thousand people are in concentration camps in North Korea.
Are we letting it happen again?

I am no policy maker. I am no international relations expert. But I am a follower of Jesus Christ, and I believe that the United States must do something.

Bringing me to reason two.
I’ve become friends with a student who took spent some time in South Korea last semester. The Lord has given her a heart for the Korean people, particularly the North Koreans. She is organizing a project that will be run by PHC to raise awareness about the atrocities the North Korean government is committing and to lobby for the U.S. government to take action. I am hopeful that the Lord is going to use this project to begin to remedy the North Korean situation.

This weekend, there will be a national call to worship in North Korea. Every citizen will be ordered to worship Kim Jong-un. There are Christians in North Korea.

This weekend, our brothers and sisters will be faced with the decision that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego faced in Babylon. They will have to choose to worship the state and bow to a false god or abstain and face almost certain death and torture.

Pray for our brothers and sisters in North Korea. Pray that the U.S. government will respond to Shin Dong-hyuk’s story appropriately. Pray for the North Korean government to relent. Pray for the perseverance of the poor people trapped in concentration camps. Pray that the Lord would be glorified through this project at PHC.

I skipped class today because I am aware of what happened in Nazi Germany. But we learn about this tragedy in order to prevent something like it from happening again.

It’s happening in North Korea.