North Korea is a secretive state known as the "hermit kingdom" - but now a 25-year-old North Korean defector has lifted the lid on the totalitarian regime.
"It's better to die than to live this way," the unnamed woman said from a café in Seoul, South Korea.
Some say residents need permission to keep pets, wear blue denim, keep long hair and even have a hot shower.
According to a report by the United Nations World Food Programme, 10 million people living in North Korea are malnourished.
This comes as Kim Jong-un's military fired two missiles today in a dangerous act of aggression.
The defector, who escaped in 2019 at the age of 23, said that regardless of the risk, life in North Korea is not worth staying for.
She said they send entire families into concentration camps and they make sure to put them on different work shifts, so the family is never reunited.
Concentration camps are essentially forced labour camps and young kids get sent there without little to no formal education.
"It's hard to survive. A lot of the health problems that we see have reduced … [But] it's still a very prevalent issue, malnutrition," she said.
The defector said the government does anything it can to ensure that the camps go noticed.
"There was this one concentration camp that just disappeared overnight because they wanted to give a false image that it wasn't there," she continued.
"They moved all the people that were originally in the concentration camp elsewhere, and they made this facade of a small village. So they brought in like just regular coal miners to live there."
North Koreans who are sent to camps are considered criminals by the government.
Amnesty International has documented torture, rape, the killing of children, deliberate starvation and executions in the camps.
The report spanned nine years of testimony and said there was “systematic and widespread” use of beatings and other disproportionately harsh punishments.
“Some detainees were asked to place their heads on the bars [of the cell] and the guards would beat us with a club … we were just like punching bags to them," one former detainee said.
But once people manage to leave their lives are still a challenge and they try and adapt to the modern world with lots more freedom.
North Korean defector Daehyeon Park started a charity to meet the needs of the 33,834 defectors living in South Korea that are struggling to build their lives.
North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea today, which was the second such test in just four days.
