No one knows for sure how many North Koreans are in concentration camps. Some say that there are around 100,000 people, mostly Christians.

Witnesses have claimed that North Korea has been conducting experiments with gas chambers, but no one knows whether they are using them to exterminate people. Other witnesses claim that there are concentration camps where political opponents and Christians are detained. Their only crime was to “oppose” North Korean policies or to be a Christian. Families of defectors are also reportedly sent to concentration camps.

News of these concentration camps have spread around the world but has not caused the impact it should have caused. After the Holocaust, people said “never again”, but then again there was Cambodia, Rwanda and there is Darfur and North Korea. And each time, the international community did very little to stop those genocides from occurring.

Indeed, the international community was more worried about North Korea getting rid of its nuclear weapons than of its concentration camps. Had it put as much pressure on the country to close concentration camps as it had to close its nuclear facilities, how many innocent North Korean lives would have been saved?

Stories from concentration camps have reached a worldwide audience that seems to react to that by being indifferent. New-born babies' heads are crushed by officers working in concentration camps, families are sent to gas chambers to experiment how they would react, and apparently they react by sticking together and with parents trying desperately to save their children’s lives through mouth to mouth breathing. Summary executions are not uncommon.

One other fact that seems to have eluded people is that many of the detainees are Christians. Two-thirds of the Korean Christian population, around 25% of the total population, used to live in North Korea. Persecutions started in North Korea, which led to many fleeing to the South before the Korean War. People are sent to concentration camps just because of their religious beliefs. Just like the Holocaust.

There are several associations worldwide that denounce atrocities and human rights violations in North Korea, but it seems as though nothing can be done to stop the genocide. How many years will it take for concentration camp survivors to have people understand what they had been through? 30? 40 years? Never? The problem does not lie in understanding the horrors of concentration camps. It lies in the fact that there is a genocide that is happening, and something can be done about it.

I guess the reason concentration camp survivors write about their experiences is that they don’t want people to be put in concentration camps anymore. Now that we know that there still are people who are locked up in concentration camps, is there anything we can do about it? People can make their voices heard, and if governments managed to strip away the nuclear weapon from North Korea, I’m sure they can get them to free political and religious prisoners. Because this time, governments and people cannot say, “We didn’t know”.