North Korea’s nationwide political prisons are notorious as much for secrecy as brutality, with only limited information about the crimes against humanity committed within their walls trickling out via defectors.

But a now-forgotten memoir by a former DPRK general offers a revealing look into the origins of this cruel system of terror, providing a rare account of life inside the black box of the country’s concentration camps.

The account of life in North Korea during the 1950s and 1960s — “The Taedong River Dyed Red” (붉게 물든 대동강) — was first published in Seoul in 1991 and credited to the