Gratitude, Remembrance, and Grace

On Monday, May 5, Robert Edsel, founder and chairman of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation, had the great honor to speak about freedom and the heartwarming and inspirational demonstration of gratitude by the Dutch in creating a unique grave adoption program, which continues to honor their American liberators 80 years later. 

Below is the text of Robert Edsel's full remarks.

Courtesy of  the Embassy of the Netherlands in the United States

I am grateful to the Embassy of the Netherlands in the United States, and especially to Ambassador Birgitta Tazelaar, for inviting me to serve as the keynote speaker at the Netherlands Freedom Concert. I am also grateful to our mutual friend, Ambassador of Ukraine to the United States, Oksana Markarova, for being among our special guests.



The event was a powerful reminder of the enduring bonds between nations that cherish freedom and honor those who defend it.

Below, I would like to share with you my remarks, in the hopes to convey, even if just in a small part, how meaningful and unique it is what the people of the Limburg province in the Netherlands have done, and continue to do, to honor the memory and sacrifice of our fallen heroes.

To Ambassador Tazelaar and her team at the Netherlands Embassy, thank you for extending to me this great honor. To everyone gathered here on this resplendent afternoon, friends we know and friends in waiting, Welcome.

It is altogether fitting and proper that this beautiful carillon – an expression of gratitude from the people of the Netherlands to the people of the United States for their help during and after World War II – stands on a hill next to Arlington National Cemetery, where many of the boys who defeated the greatest threat to civilization in history are buried, and overlooks three iconic symbols of freedom and democracy: the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and the United States Capitol. It is especially poignant today, on this 80th anniversary of Dutch Liberation from Nazi occupation and a formal end to the “hunger winter” that claimed so many innocent lives, because the outcome of the war could have been quite different.

Oprah Winfrey once spoke to a gathering of women. After taking the stage, she looked out at her audience, smiled, and said: “No one is coming to save you. ” After the laughter died down, she smiled again and said, “No one is coming to save you. ” Some laughed; many did not. Again, came the words, “No one is coming to save you, ” but this time, her words having resonated, the room was deathly quiet.

During World War II, they did come. They came from all 48 states. They came from the territories of Alaska and Hawaii and the District of Columbia. They came by the millions, American men and women. They volunteered to serve – as airmen who flew on small raids or within enormous bomber armadas, infantry officers who saw combat as the organizing principle of their existence, and volunteers who fell to their knees at the prospect of facing the enemy – but rose again to fight on. They were doctors’ sons from the Deep South and poor kids from the Northeast; citizen soldiers and Army lifers; Native Americans and Jewish refugees. They brought with them the industrial might of a wounded nation, fully awakened from the dangerous consequences of isolationism. They fought their way onto the European continent and other lands far from home, determined to defeat the greatest threat to freedom the world had ever known. And when the fighting ended and freedom prevailed, most came home, but many did not.

Even during the fight, one nation struggled with the question of how to thank your liberators when so many were no longer alive to thank. That nation was the Netherlands. In establishing a grave adoption program, the leaders of Margraten encouraged the people of south Limburg to become adopters of the 17,800 Americans buried at the nearby American Military Cemetery. They had cared for these American boys and girls while they were alive. They had helped dig the graves of those who were dead. Now, they were determined to preserve their memory.

By the first post-war Memorial Day, several hundred people in and around Margraten had volunteered to become adopters, visiting the fallen several times of year and placing flowers on their graves. Resumption of international mail service in late summer 1945 revealed an even greater need which Mayor Ronckers in Margraten, and Emilie Michiels van Kessenich, wife of the mayor of Maastricht, quickly embraced: reach across the ocean into American homes to comfort the families of the fallen. To do that, Dutch adopters needed the names and addresses of the American next of kin. When American officials refused to provide that information, Emilie Michiels van Kessenich penned a letter to the President of the United States, Harry Truman, seeking help.

“Now that most of the Army has gone back to the States," she wrote, “and only your fallen heroes remain in our soil, we want to establish a lasting tie between their relatives and our people.” After asking the President to intercede, Emilie concluded her letter with an impassioned plea:

“I am a mother of 11 children ranging from 14 years to 3 months, and if it should happen that my boys were buried in American soil, I should be so grateful if an American mother would send me a photograph and should go there sometimes in my place.”

By the second post-war Memorial Day, every one of the 17,800 American liberators buried at the cemetery had a Dutch adopter. Every. Single. One. There were many witnesses to that remarkable expression of gratitude because more than 40,000 Dutch citizens attended the May 1946 ceremony, a mass turnout that the New York Times characterized as being “without parallel in a foreign country.”

Several weeks later, determined to assuage the grief of American families, and frustrated that U. S. authorities steadfastly refused to share next of kin information, Emilie Michiels van Kessenich boarded a KLM plane and crossed the Atlantic on a mission of mercy. She traveled the United States for five weeks staying in the homes of families who had lost a loved one. She met with war widows young enough to be her daughters. She comforted other mothers who had suffered the worst loss imaginable. She absorbed their grief and left reassurance and grace in its place telling all with whom she met, “leave your boys with us; we will watch over them like our own, forever.”

 Today, eighty years later, the Dutch of south Limburg, indeed the Netherlands, have never wavered from that forever promise; eighty continuous years of fidelity to the American men and women who paid for Dutch freedom with their lives driven not by duty or obligation, but by gratitude and love. The success of the Dutch grave adoption program does not derive from the act of any one person. Rather, it is the consequence of harnessing each individual act of kindness and humanity into one shared commitment. Amid the most lethal and destructive war in history emerged one of the most decent and noble examples of humanity.

But the original mission of Mayor Ronckers, Emilie Michiels van Kessenich, and others, is not complete. Today, the Dutch adopters are in contact with only twenty percent of the next of kin of the soldiers whose memories they hold so dear. For that reason, the Monuments Men and Women Foundation has joined forces with the Dutch Foundation for Adopting Graves American Cemetery Margraten. The name of our joint venture tells all: the Forever Promise Project. We intend to use the visibility of my new book about these remarkable events, Remember Us, to encourage Americans to visit the foreverpromise.org website, search the database of the 10,000 men and women who are remembered at the Netherlands American Cemetery, and complete a short questionnaire that will enable our two foundations to connect each American family member with the Dutch adopter of their loved one.

I want to end my remarks with a short story from Remember Us about an American mother who, after the war, traveled to the Netherlands from Georgia on a quest to find her only son and bring him home. Once there, she met with the Dutch family who had sheltered her boy after his B-24 bomber was shot down. She visited the site a short distance from Apledoorn, where Dutch Resistance fighters had buried him after his torture and execution by the Gestapo. Wanting to honor her boy with a small memorial service before returning home, she published a notice in the newspaper, inviting the public to attend.

The morning broke cold and rainy, not a ray of sun in the sky, and as she walked to the grave, she assumed a handful of people, at best, would be there, perhaps only three or four. She found 1,200 Dutch mourners gathered in the drizzling rain at her son’s side. So many, she marveled, from so far away, caring so much. As the minister closed the service, shefell to her knees, there in the rain and the mud. She reached into her purse for a jar of red Georgia clay. She had been planning to put it in the coffin for her son’s journey home.

Now, she emptied the jar on his grave in Ugchelen. She spread the clay gently, passing her hand back and forth, as she had rubbed her boy’s back so many nights when he lay afraid or feverish as a child. She was leaving him, she had decided, here among the Dutch. Here among the people who appreciated his sacrifice, and honored him, and cared for him as well as any mother could. God bless America’s men and women in uniform.

God bless the people of the Netherlands, especially those in south Limburg, who for eighty years have considered watching over their American liberators a privilege. And may the friendship between our two great nations and our people, bound together by the seamstress of time, ever remain the standard of gratitude, remembrance, and grace.