Tuesday 26 May 2015

Americans Gave Their Lives To Defeat The Nazis. The Dutch Have Never Forgotten

image credit: Raymond Klaassen

They haven't forgotten. For 70 years, the Dutch have come to a verdant U.S. cemetery outside the small village of Margraten to care for the graves of Americans killed in World War II. Last Sunday, they came again, bearing Memorial Day bouquets for men and women they never knew, but whose 8,300 headstones the people of the Netherlands have adopted as their own.

At the cemetery's annual commemoration, 6,000 people poured onto the 65-acre burial grounds just a few miles from the German border, including scores of descendants of American war dead who had traveled here from all over the United States.

They were eager to pay tribute to parents or grandparents who had died to defeat the Nazis. But they also wanted to thank the Dutch families who had been tending the graves of their loved ones, often passing the responsibility from one generation to the next.

1 comment(s):

Anonymous said...

Thank you. It was worth doing.