Kindness and Compassion, Dutch Style

I've been working on this article about an American soldier who was killed in action. He died in Germany in 1945 on the front lines of World War II.

The article I'm assigned to write isn't all that long and it's pretty tightly focused. I can't use even half the information I've gathered about him. I've interviewed his sister, daughter and wife. All of whom were so happy to speak about their lost loved one that I didn't have the heart to break them off when I had the information I needed. I let them talk and I learned something that touched my heart.

There is an American cemetery outside the village of Margraten, which is in the Netherlands, where 8,301 American soldiers are buried. Because the soldiers were buried on foreign soil and their families couldn't be there to tend the graves, ordinary Dutch citizens adopted them.

It was a system that sounds much like the adopt-a-child programs that you see advertised on TV. The Dutch families were assigned an American grave and a pen-pal exchange was set up. The Dutch visited the graves on a regular basis, brought fresh flowers, took photos of the markers and mailed letters and pictures back to the American families, who then wrote back, and so on.

The sister, daughter and wife of the fallen American soldier I spoke to couldn't say enough good things about the Dutch family that adopted the man who was their brother/father/husband. Their correspondence lasted for years and from the way they spoke about the experience, I could tell the relationship had affected them deeply.

The American family has never been to Europe, never met their assigned Dutch family. And yet.

And yet they are filled with gratitude and wonderment, even still after all these years, for the kindness and compassion paid to them by strangers.