For her work educating and hiding Jewish children during the Holocaust, she was posthumously recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

[2] She was involved in the Friends' Foreign Mission Association (FFMA), which is how she met her future husband, Cornelius "Kees" Boeke.

[2] Boeke himself refused to pay taxes because of governmental military spending, which led to economic uncertainty throughout their lives.

[3]:4 In 1938, the school began offering classes for German-Jewish refugee children fleeing from Nazi Germany.

[5] In the fall of 1942, Boeke-Cadbury and her husband began hiding nine-year-old Norman Magnus and his six-year-old sister Anita; the children had false papers with false identities; they, and later, two of their sisters, remained with the Boeke family until 1944, when they rejoined their parents in hiding in Limburg.