There was no hope to be set free, though, as they and all other prisoners were loaded onto cattle trains and sent to the Dutch labour camp of Vught, where they were forced to make radios for the Luftwaffe.
After Pyongyang sentenced the US student Otto Warmbier to 15 years of hard labour for crimes against the state, the White House spokesman Josh Earnest called for the student's immediate release.
American basketball star Brittney Griner has been sent to a penal colony in Russia to serve her sentence for drug possession, this according to her legal team on Wednesday.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: In 1945, after writing a letter criticizing Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and spent eight years in Russian prison and labour camps.
Russia released U.S.-Russian dual national Ksenia Karolina, who was sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony last year after being found guilty of treason for donating less than $100 to a U.S.-based Ukrainian charity.
So there was always in the background, even if she herself was not taken to the Gulag or a work camp or anything like that, she knew that that threat of violence was there.