Her memoir The Walls Came Tumbling Down described her attempts to return to the Netherlands from Germany after being released from prison at the end of World War II.
Born in the Netherlands to an upper-class family, she was a graduate student at the University of Leiden at the start of World War II and became a courier in the Dutch resistance, where she served under the code name Zip.
In 1943, she was recruited as a helper on an escape line running via Belgium, France and the Pyrenees to Spain, from where escapees could travel to London.
The nazi counterintelligence agencies were able to disrupt the line by arresting various Dutch and Belgian helpers between the end of September and November 1943.
The Allied High Command was preparing an invasion on the West coast of continental Europe and needed information about the military situation in various countries.
In Bern, she received instructions to organize a new resistance group in the Netherlands to collect military information and to set up a line via Paris, France, to Switzerland.
Joke (pronounced "Yo-kuh") had proven to be a competent and successful guide, who until her arrest in April 1944 had helped 320 people escape to Belgium.
While their sentences were being considered for pardon, the Allied forces reached the Dutch border town of Breda at the beginning of September 1944.
The women were loaded into cattle wagons at the train station in Utrecht, but the procedural documents were left with the person who decided on pardons.
Months after the end of the war, a large envelope surfaced in the Netherlands bearing the stamps of all their prisons, with dates just days after they had left.
[1] At Waldheim, Henriette and the other prisoners were severely undernourished, and spent most of their free time embroidering bits of cloth with terse iconography about their experience.
For instance, one section of Roosenburg's embroidery shows a crude drawing of a gun to indicate that the prisoners had heard what they thought was Allied gunfire, as well as the names "Nel" and "Joke" in Morse code to indicate that she was in solitary confinement, that Nell and Joke were in the two adjacent cells, and that they communicated by tapping Morse code on the walls.
The group had heard that the Russians intended to send displaced persons back home via Odessa, a port in Ukraine on the Black Sea; considering that too far of a side trip, Dries, Nel, Joke, and Henriette stayed behind to take Fafa to a local civilian hospital instead, and then set out on their own for the Netherlands.
Henriette and her friends, through bartering and guile, came to travel along Elbe River in a small boat from Waldheim to Coswig, where they were accosted by Russian soldiers and taken to a displaced persons camp populated by Belgians, Dutch, and Italians.