Inside North Korea : Diary of a Mad Place

In 1999 German physician Norbert Vollertsen joined a medical assistance group called German Emergency Doctors and was sent to North Korea.

When he arrived in Pyongyang in the summer of 1999, it was the beginning of a forbidding personal odyssey through a 'mad place'.

Vollertsen worked at several hospitals, orphanages and kindergartens in and around the capital city of Pyongyang.

Then one day he offered to donate his own skin for a graft for a burn victim.

As a result, he was awarded a 'Friendship Medal' and given his own car and a VIP passport that allowed him to travel freely through the country.

What he saw shocked him. The people had no water, no medicine, no sanitation.

Eight and nine year old children were forced to work at night to build a 'Youth Hero Motorway'.

Mass starvation was used as a tool of political control.

People everywhere were under surveillance, informed on by their own family members.

Those who tried to flee over the Chinese border or dissented from this brutal regime, particularly Christians, were tortured in concentration camps. When Vollertsen tried to show foreign journalists what he had discovered, he was harassed by the North Korean government and finally deported at the end of 2001.

Inside North Korea reads like a tour of hell. It is at once an act of personal witness and also a fascinating insider's view of one of the dark places of the world, a country that has become more important as it has become more dangerous.