Henriette Roosenburg

Henriette Roosenburg (26 May 1916 - 1972) was a Dutch journalist and political prisoner, perhaps best known for her memoir The Walls Came Tumbling Down, about 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. During this time she also wrote for the Dutch newspaper Het Parool. In 1944 she was caught and sentenced to death, and became a Night and Fog prisoner in a German prison at Waldheim.

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 "Nell" and "Joke" (pronounced "Yoe-kuh") 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.

Henriette and the other prisoners were released on 6 May 1945; Henriette and four other Dutch NN prisoners (Dries, Nell, Joke, and Fafa, a Dutch NN prisoner with severe arthritis) had a chance to return to the Netherlands a few days later when the U.S. Army arrived with trucks to carry people through the Russian lines. However, Fafa's arthritis was so severe that she could not walk; and the surrounding roads were largely unpaved and rough. The other four did not believe that Fafa would survive the trip even if there were room for her cot--and there was not room for her cot; the truck was densely packed and offered standing room only. 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, Nell, Joke, and Henriette stayed behind to take Fafa to a local civilian hospital instead, and then set out on their own for the Netherlands.

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