After crawling into her cell, Lee Young-joo was ordered to sit cross-legged with her hands on her knees.
She was not allowed to move for up to 12 hours a day.
A slight shuffle or a hushed whisper to her cell mates would be harshly punished.
She had limited access to water and was given only a few ground corn husks to eat.
“I felt like an animal, not a human,” she said.
She told the BBC she spent hours being interrogated for doing something many of us take for granted – leaving her country. She was trying to escape North Korea in 2007 and was caught in China and sent back.
