Kang Chol Hwan was barely a teenager when he was assigned the task of burying his fellow prisoners. It was, in some ways, a coveted job in Yodok, a political prison camp some 60 miles out of Pyongyang, North Korea — as grave-diggers were afforded the opportunity to strip the corpses and keep their clothes, welcome supplements to the grave-diggers’ own threadbare garb.

At Yodok, the dead were the lucky ones. They had escaped the daily grind of beatings, torture and brainwashing. Death was a reprieve. Death by suicide, however, was a crime, for which punishment was meted out on the criminal’s surviving family members. It was the ultimate selfish means of escape.

After 10 years at Yodok, Kang and his family — grandmother, father, uncle and sister — were released. Kang had grown up in the camp, imprisoned in 1977 at the age of 9 — the better part of his formative years devoted to becoming a regime-approved automaton, forced to attend public executions and post-mortem stonings.

Kang’s crime: His grandfather, a wealthy businessman who had lived in Japan, openly criticized official policy and was therefore labeled an enemy of the regime. When he disappeared one day, his family was told that he was away on a business trip. Soldiers soon came for the rest of the family, rounding up everyone except Kang’s mother, who was not biologically related to Kang’s grandfather. The seed of the criminal’s insubordination, the regime mandated, must be expunged from the next three generations. Guilt by association.

Kang eventually fled North Korea, however, and escaped to China, crossing over to South Korea in 1992. Since the 2000 publication of his memoir, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, Kang, a staff writer for the daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo, has been a vocal proponent of a hard-line approach toward the regime.

In a June 13 meeting at the White House, Kang urged President George W. Bush to prioritize human rights above nuclear concerns during talks with North Korea. The President, who had read The Aquariums of Pyongyang and distributed copies to members of his staff, was so moved by the story, that he invited Kang to the Oval Office.

Bush’s first question to Kang: “What would you do as the U.S. president for North Korea,” Kang recalls. The United States’ first priority, Kang told Bush, should be to protect those North Koreans who have fled by pressuring China to stop repatriating defectors. Second, international cooperation is key to freeing political prisoners from the camps, where North Koreans are dying daily. Third, is the nuclear issue. “Without first addressing human rights, the nuclear problem will be difficult to resolve,” he told the president.

Kang recently took that message nationwide, on a U.S. college tour that began in September. Kang spoke in lecture halls so crowded, it was standing room only, says Adrian Hong, executive director of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), who accompanied the speaker for half of the tour.