Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer [famine] targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a fri

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer [famine] targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed. As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.” -- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick