Shin Dong-hyuk, escapee from North Korean gulag According to North Korean defectors, President Kim Jong-un recently “issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth” for “practical applications be drawn from it.” Another source reports him as saying that North Korea’s secret police should be restructured—“similar to the Gestapo.” Whether or not the twenty-something tyrant is really passing out as elite birthday presents “Mein Kampf,” translated into Korean, the rumors resonate. North Korea’s gulag—with an estimated 200,000 people in “reeducation” camps where the death rate from malnutrition is 40 percent—makes that country a throwback to the era of totalitarian dictators. Analogies with the Holocaust are problematic, but comparisons with Stalin’s forced labor camps are on point. Belatedly in the twenty-first century, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea is being recognized as the world’s worst—and still least-reported—human rights abuser. Credit for this belongs not only to such high-profile NGOs as Amnesty International, but to an unheralded alliance including North Korean expatriates, Korean American activists, and Christian and Jewish human rights groups. Every July Fourth, we recognize that freedom is indivisible. That remembrance is a flame that might flicker out without the efforts of human rights activists. At a time when so many are turned off by political polarization and “culture wars” identified with religion, there is another truth that could reconnect Americans: interfaith efforts to keep lit the flame of the human rights cause everywhere. In the case of victims of the North Korean gulag, the backbone of this effort has been activists belonging to American churches, including especially Evangelical churches, as well as Korean “diaspora” churches ranging from Southern California to South Korea where almost 30,000 defectors from the North Korean regime have established their own church network. Many individuals could be singled out, including North Korean-born refugee, Robert Park, an ordained minister who entered the forbidden North before Christmas, 2009, when he was tortured for six weeks. Suzanne Scholte, a wife, mother, and Christian activist, has crusaded on behalf of stateless North Korean children stranded in China whose precarious situation has been recognized by the Obama Administration. First becoming involved in the human rights cause in the Soviet Union and Cuba, Scholte has been part of a broader “cross-pollenization” in which Christian and Jewish activists learned from and cooperated with each other. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper cites Scholte—who was awarded the Seoul Peace Prize—as an inspiration, yet he himself has powerfully energized the movement. In 1998, the Center convened a videoconference between Los Angeles and Tokyo including testimony by victims of chemical warfare Unit 731, responsible for the deaths of some 12,000 Chinese and Russian prisoners and Allied POWs. Among the victims: American POWs shipped on the “Totori Maru” from the Philippines to Pusan, Korea, and then by train to Mukden in Manchuria. Rabbi Cooper—a veteran of the campaign for Soviet dissidents—was especially moved by recollections of Japanese exploitation of WWII Korean “comfort women” as well as reports that today’s North Korean regime was using “human guinea pigs” to manufacture chemical weapons ultimately sold to Iran and South Korea. He made a fact-finding mission to South Korea where he interviewed eyewitnesses and defectors who provided first-person testimony describing the gassing of entire families of political prisoners at Camp 22, near Hoeryong, North Hamgyeong Province. Recalling his 2004 mission, Rabbi Cooper says: “I will never forget the anguish of one defector who described how he supervised the killing of parents and their child in a glass-encased chamber. Shocking details of how long the agony went on and the efforts of doomed parents to breathe air into the lungs of their dying child, were duly written down and forwarded for analysis to those in charge of the production and upgrade of North Korean poison gas.” Having addressed the issue personally with President George W. Bush, Rabbi Cooper is Vice Chair of the Executive Committee of the North Korean Freedom Coalition (NKFC), sponsor of North Korean Freedom Week. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Committee for Human Rights in Korea (HRNK) that has included UN Ambassador designate, Samantha Power. In 2004, Rabbi Cooper inspired Joshua Stanton, an attorney and former U.S. soldier in South Korea, to establish a blog. Stanton publicized research, based on GoogleEarth, about a mass escape from Camp 16. Rabbi Cooper also encouraged founders of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a grassroots activist network focusing on the rescue and resettlement of North Korean prisoners. In 2006, the Wiesenthal Center called on the United Nations to take legal action against North Korean officials who sent disabled North Korean citizens to special “Ward 49” camps. Shin Dong-hyuk—born into Camp 14 and the only escapee to live to tell the tale—visited the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, and met with Holocaust Survivors at the Center’s Museum of Tolerance (MOT) in Los Angeles. The MOT, which directly serves Southern California’s multicultural metropolis, has become a natural meeting place for Korean and Jewish activists. The MOT has featured three major events focusing on North Korea, including a 2012 program on North Korea’s political prison camp system. Speakers included Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of “Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad,” and Blaine Harden, author of “Escape from Camp 14,” the story of Shin Dong-hyuk. The Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea (WCSGNK), chose January 27, 2012—the anniversary of Soviet forces liberating Auschwitz—for mass demonstrations in Tokyo, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Berlin, London and New York. Before the Pearl Harbor attack closed down Pacific sea lanes, some 600 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution journeyed on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Korea and then to Japanese ports from where they sailed to San Francisco’s “Angel Island.” Now, it’s appropriate for the Wiesenthal Center to help focus the global conscience on the North Korean people’s plight. Simon Wiesenthal’s memory demands it.