The gist of the negative emails seems to be that I have blood on my hands. Perhaps more important, as readers of my book will see, they were not rebels but obedient servants of the regime. Because of this, I am confident that they cannot be individually identified. Not only did I change their names, I blurred their identities, even though it got in the way of portraying them as unique, and uniquely loveable, individuals. A journalist has a duty to protect anybody who could be compromised by her reporting, and I did my best to protect my students. The moral obligation I feel is not to Pust’s educators but to the students there. With this book, my goal was to humanise North Korea in hopes that the outside world would come to care more deeply about the suffering of its inhabitants, and to do everything possible to help bring about change. And none of it benefits the remaining 25 million North Koreans, who are far less privileged than the students at Pust. In return, they gain a foothold in a nation that is, to their minds, ripe for conversion. The evangelical Christians from the United States, South Korea, and other countries around the world bankroll the education of many of North Korea’s future leaders, the sons of the elite, “in cooperation” with the North Korean regime, following its strictures. North Korea is the world’s most brutal regime, a gulag posing as a nation.

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