[2] Helena Kuipers was born on 26 May 1893 to grain merchants and millers Hendrik Rietberg and Clara Christina Theodora Dulfer in Winterswijk, as the fourth child in a Dutch Reformed family.

She started on a small scale, taking in Jewish onderduikers (people who had to go underground to avoid arrest and persecution).

Funds for all these activities came from one of a number of illegal sources, which later were united as the Nationaal Steun Fonds, for which she became the paymaster for her area, the Achterhoek.

[2] With his help she set up a national network of local help organizations (organizational meetings were supposedly Bible study groups[2]), the foundation for the Landelijke Organisatie voor Hulp aan Onderduikers [nl] (LO), and the Landelijke Knokploegen [nl] (LKP), allied to it after August 1943.

On 17 August 1944 the courier bringing them fresh identification papers was betrayed and arrested, and the Germans found evidence of their hideout.

[3] The couple was jailed in the Koepelgevangenis in Arnhem and agreed that she would take full responsibility; they thought a woman would be punished less than a man.

She was also placed in charge of distributing food to the women who worked in the war industry, at the Siemens factory at Ravensbrück, and was thus able to provide comfort to her fellow prisoners.

After the war, it took a while to discover what had happened to their mother, but they did receive letters from women who had survived Ravensbrück and told them how much Kuipers-Rietberg had comforted and supported them.

When Princess Wilhelmina of the Netherlands came to Winterswijk in 1955 for the unveiling of the monument for Kuipers-Rietberg in 1955, she told Heleen, "you must be proud of your mother", to which she only responded, "I wish she were still here".