The Dutch in Margraten Keep the Faith
Dressed in orange, the people of
Margraten, The Netherlands come to a cemetery with flowers. They spread over the 65 acres and 8300
headstones tending each with the honorable love that comes from a sense of
proprietorship. What makes this notable
is that this is not a cemetery filled with the graves of the Dutch, but
Americans.
Margraten
is the sight of over 13 American cemeteries that dot Europe, resting places for
the dead of World War I and World War II.
None of these may be better cared for than the one in Margraten, where
there is a waiting list of people hoping to be given the care of a grave. Dutch
devotion has not waivered. The care has
not become routine. The Dutch remember.
By
the late summer of 1944 D-Day had already launched its spearhead of justice
toward the Nazi forces that had spread like cancer across Europe. The town of Margraten (located between the
borders of Germany and Belgium) had been freed from Nazi occupation, but the
war continued. Field Marshall Montgomery’s
overly ambitious attempt to take the Dutch bridges into Germany in operation
Market Garden had set its sights on “A Bridge Too Far.” This strategic hubris had sent many brave men
to a preventable death. The German
troops were now fighting on their own land, the winter was brutal, Americans
were dying and their bodies needed to be buried.
In
November of 1944 an orchard in Margraten was selected as the only place in the
Netherlands were American fallen would be buried. The first wave of trucks was so over-whelming
that the men charged with digging the graves (the 611th
Quartermaster Corp) became physically ill.
But from the beginning, the Dutch of Margraten welcomed the Americans—both
living and dead—into their homes. Commanders
slept in homes, the enlisted men in the schools. Breakfasts were served to all by the Dutch
who had little food themselves, who had known starvation, but who also knew who
had freed them for Nazi occupation.
For
over six months some 500 bodies arrived each day! The mayor asked his people for help in
digging graves. Almost 18,000 Americans
were buried in that Dutch orchard, occasionally the same men that had helped
liberate Margraten itself. On May 29,
1945 over 200 Dutch men, women and children spent the night fashioning truckloads
of flowers into bouquets and wreaths.
The next morning, Memorial Day, a solemn procession of these citizens
took the flowers to the cemetery, laying them by the fresh dirt of the graves
of their liberators.
The
Nazi occupation of The Netherlands had been brutal on the Dutch. Men were killed in the resistance or forced
into hiding while they fought in the underground. The Jews of Holland had been taken to
concentration camps and the despicable hell that only blind zealotry can
create. For four years the Dutch had been
ground under an iron boot. The people of
Margraten saw, many times in intimate detail, how the same Americans that
liberated them were then returned as occupants of their orchard cemetery.
Now they
decorate the graves on Memorial Day, holidays, even birthdays, for they know
the names and lives of the men they honor.
The Dutch do not forget their history.
They do not cleans it to fit modern (and transient) norms of
behavior. They respect who they are and
know they arrived at this spot through a process. They remember their friends. They are, simply, good people.
Hartelijk bedank! Ze hebben het geloof.
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