Hello and thank you for downloading the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson.

The past brought to life through revealing personal testimony.

This week, Korea, the division of the peninsula at the end at the Second World War.

We thought initially that the Russian troops were the liberation of you,

you call them a great liberation army, you know.

But later it turned out that they were the communist troops.

We'll experience a Japanese concentration camp in China,

on earth a T-Rex skeleton, and beat the man who took a risk and published the first Harry Potter book.

I read the first two chapters and people often say how much do you have to read before you know something's good.

Actually I think you know after two or three chapters and I was just gripped.

Yeah and it turned out to be a good decision to publish. But first we're going to delve headlong

into the deeply disturbing world of the French penal colony system as operated in the 19th and 20th

centuries. The most notorious of these establishments was far from the French

homeland off the northern coast of South America and was known as Devil's Island.

The regime was brutal, escape was nigh on impossible, and the chances of surviving a long

sentence was slim.

It was a system designed to inflict punishment and pain as much as to remove the most dangerous

criminals from French society.

The penal colony system lasted for a hundred years and was only abandoned in August 1953.

Annex Lassaust has been speaking to Bashir Saudi, whose father Kasy was an inmate there

and one of the few to survive. Shefir a mess of me the Doha.

He was saying this, they tried to do everything to break you to the point of death. That was their objective, you know.

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