Inside North Korea

9781893554870

1893554872

In 1999, German physician Norbert Vollertsen joined a medical assistance group called German Emergency Doctors and was sent to North Korea. His arrival in Pyongyang, the capital city, was the beginning of a forbidding personal odyssey through a "mad place." Vollertsen worked at several hospitals, orphanages and kindergartens in and around Pyongyang. After he offered to donate his own skin for a graft for a burn victim, he was awarded a "Friendship Medal" and given his own car and a VIP passport that allowed him to travel freely through the country. He learned that people had no water, no medicine, no sanitation. Mass starvation was used as a tool of political control. People everywhere were under surveillance, informed on by their own family members. When Vollertsen tried to show foreign journalists his shocking discoveries, he was harassed by the North Korean government and finally deported.