Dutch honor American war dead by adopting their graves

In the fall of 1945, a Dutch teenager named Frieda van Schaik wrote a letter to the US military seeking the address of the mother of an Army officer and Harvard-trained architect who was killed about a month before the German surrender.“He is buried at the large US military cemetery in Margraten, Holland, a place of six miles from where I live,” she wrote.“I am taking care of his grave.” Van Schaik’s letter inquiring about Army Capt.

Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen sent US businessman and author Robert Edsel on an eight year odyssey to document the history of the little known Netherlands American Cemetery in the village of Margraten near the city of Maastricht.At the end of the Second World War, the cemetery contained the remains of more than 20,000 war dead, most of them Americans and all of them “adopted” by locals in gratitude for their sacrifice in helping to liberate their country from Nazi tyranny.

The Netherlands had been under Nazi occupation since May 10, 1940.It was liberated on May 5, 1945.Edsel, 68, became obsessed with the adoption program and the story of the soldiers buried over the 65-acre burial ground after meeting van Schaik on Memorial Day in 2016, he said.The book is a testament to the people of the South Limburg region of the Netherlands who helped set up the cemetery and volunteered to honor the dead for the last 80 years.

Each “adopted” soldier’s grave has been cared for by multiple generations of the same Dutch family.“Families are now in their third generation, or fourth,” writes Edsel.“Eighty years later, they write to the children, grandchildren, and extended family members of the fallen.”“Since spring 1946, when a committee of caring citizens in the small town of Margraten completed its work matching a local ‘adopter’ with every grave in the cemetery, no fallen American has been left without a mourner,” writes Edsel.

“This work is not a duty to these thousands of adopters; it is an honor.”Texa...