She thought she landed in a “dream.” The reality was a nightmare.

Nora Gateley, now 26, says she was forced to dig her own grave and scrub the floor with a toothbrush after her adoptive parents shipped her to a woman they’d met online, NBC News reported as part of joint investigation with Reuters.

‘“Get out and go dig your own grave,’” Gateley says her new mom told her. “‘I don’t care if you die. Nobody will find you. You were not even here in the first place.’”

Gateley was 14 when she went to live with Tom and Debra Schmitz in Tennessee. Her biological parents abandoned her at birth in China, and she spent her first 12 years racked with polio in an orphanage.

She thought she was the “luckiest girl in the world” when an American couple took her home with them to the Florida Keys.

Life in the United State was at first “awesome, living a dream,” but darkened rapidly, Gateley said.

The Florida parents soon grew tired of their new daughter and accused her of hitting one of their other children.

They decided to unload the teen on the Schmitz family.

The process of swapping unwanted kids from international adoptions gone bad is called “rehoming.”

Adoptive parents experiencing remorse can tap into online networks where they can ship their kids to another family without the government looking over their shoulders.

Guardians sometimes sign over legal authority, or power of attorney, to the new parents. Authorities say interstate transfers are illegal, but violators are rarely caught or punished.

The system leaves kids like Gateley vulnerable.

She was one of at least nine adopted and rehomed kids when she arrived at the Schmitzes’ isolated farmhouse in Trenton, Tenn. The couple would eventually collect a total of 17 of the children.

Debra Schmitz kept control through a sadistic system of physical punishment and mental torture, according to Gateley.

“I knew she’d lost her mind by day 2,” Gateley said.

She said Debra Schmitz would take away the brace she needed to walk on her polio-ravaged leg. And there were the “graves.”

Sometimes, Gateley was forced into the role of tiny prison guard, supervising younger kids as they dug. At least once, she spent three hours digging her own body-size hole, NBC reported.

“She said, ‘Get out and go dig your own grave,’” Gateley said. “‘Nobody will find you.’”

She and the other children were rescued by a visiting nurse, who gave her a tape recorder to document the abuse.

Debra Schmitz was sentenced in 2006 to six months in jail and put on probation after pleading guilty to 14 counts of child abuse and one count of trafficking.

Her then-husband’s record was expunged.

Gateley moved in with a new family after escaping the Schmitz house and says life improved.

“I’m happy,” she said. “I have people that love and care about me … I’m very humble and very happy and just blessed that I’m out of that situation.”

She now lives on her own and works in a doctor’s office.

Read more: Daily News