An American Cemetary in Maastricht

Statue at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial

Statue at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial

(That sounds much less fun than “An American Werewolf in London,” but I couldn’t come up with a better reference.)

Last week, I visited Maastricht, a city in the south of the Netherlands. It’s hella old (that’s the technical term,) and full to bursting with grand old cathedrals and churches, many of which are now used for other things – one is a bookstore, another is a fancy hotel. I think I’m going to write a couple of blog posts about the different things we saw, because there was a lot of interesting stuff, but I’m actually going to start outside the city. One of the more unexpected things I saw was the American military cemetery in Margraten, a village just outside of Maastricht.

Walking into the cemetery is a bit like walking back into the States – for one thing, all the signage is in English, but more strikingly, the architecture style is just like any other monument I grew up seeing in D.C. In fact, the entryway is a bit bizarre – look in one direction, and you get a really stunning vista of very European-looking countryside, and look the other direction, and you see the big marble monument, the rows of crosses, and the American flag up on a hill.

The cemetery contains the bodies of American soldiers who fought in World War II, and whose families couldn’t afford or chose not to have their bodies returned to the States. Despite being so far from home, the graves are far from forgotten: shortly after the war, local Dutch people created an organization where individuals can adopt a grave, to leave flowers and things like that. Classes of local primary school students also sometimes adopt graves. We were there on a rainy afternoon, but there were several people visiting, and preparation was underway for a concert the next day; it was a quite vibrant memorial.

White marble crosses at the Netherlands American Cemetery.Military remembrances in the United States tend to make me a bit uncomfortable. We’ve been at war with Iraq and Afghanistan most of my life, and we learned about Korea and Vietnam in school – my associates with the military involve a lot of unpopular wars and morally ambiguous situations. Here, though, World War II is the most recent real war, and it looms large, since the Netherlands was occupied by Germany. So now, generations later, they still take care of the graves of American soldiers.

The musicians were rehearsing for the concert the next day, something dramatic and in Latin. It was quite a scene; looking out through the rain over the rows of crosses, with sweeping orchestral music in the background and the American flag waving up on a hill. I was definitely not expecting a moment of patriotism out in the middle of the Dutch countryside, but there it was.

One comment on “An American Cemetary in Maastricht
  1. Pingback: Churches Everywhere! (More About Maastricht) ‹ Katie Casey

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