The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, is an account of the imprisonment of Kang Chol-Hwan and his family in the Yodok concentration camp in North Korea. It begins with an introduction by co-author Pierre Rigoulot describing Kang's new life in the Republic of Korea, then continues with a brief history of both North and South Korea since the Korean War in 1953. It shows how a powerful family with money and material goods has everything taken from them by the Workers' Party of Korea. Kang's family, while of Korean ethnicity, originally lived in Japan before... emigrating to the DPRK at the behest of his communist grandmother. When Kang was nine years old, his grandfather was imprisoned for suspected activity against the State. As the policy at the time was to incarcerate the immediate family of political prisoners, Kang Chol-Hwan, his grandmother, father, uncle and younger sister Miho were all imprisoned at the Yodok concentration camp #2915. There they suffered and viewed many atrocities over a period of ten years including disease, starvation, torturous punishments and public execution.
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