A woman in North Korea who started a secret Christian church in a prison camp where she was forced to work has revealed that people living under the regime are made to believe that Christians kill people and suck their blood.
Despite extreme persecution, Hae Woo has won converts over to the faith. She explained how she was conditioned to hate Christians before her conversion.
"Christians were not capable of 'revolutionary acts' and so were enemies," she said, according to the National Catholic Register.
"Every form of religion, and especially Christianity, was like opium: addictive and destructive. I heard stories about Christians who went to hospitals, enticed people into cellars, killed them there and sucked the blood out of their bodies so that they could sell it. The thought of it was horrifying to me."
Persecution watchdogs Open Doors ranks North Korea the world's worst persecutor of Christians. Christianity is illegal in the country, and anyone who displays their faith publicly gets sent to prison camps.
The National Catholic Register also reported that Woo's work offers "a message of hope inside hell on earth."
On Sundays and religious holidays, the faithful few would gather to worship at the toilets or another unwatched corner of the area they lived.
Woo admitted that it was God who helped her survive her time at the prison camp and gave her the strength to spread the Good News among the other prisoners. She eventually escaped to South Korea, where she can practice her faith freely.
Thousands of other Christians in North Korea are not as fortunate. "I still feel as if I'm in my honeymoon period," Hae Woo admitted. "Of course, there are lots of things wrong here and some people think that South Korea is too materialistic, but what do they know about freedom? For that matter, what does anyone know about freedom? I learned what freedom is in the camp."
