On Liberation

My Uncle's War -- and Ours

GELEEN, The Netherlands

On a bright afternoon this fall, as a few hundred people from this small town gathered on the green, I watched a fading memory start its transformation into a permanent memorial. After 60 years, private tales of liberation from Nazi occupation that had been told around family tables -- or sometimes not told at all because of the pain they evoked -- began to pass into the public realm.

Arno Bemelmans had brought me on this journey. He was 18 years old when America's 2nd Armored Division -- known as "Hell on Wheels" -- rolled into combat in this Dutch town on Sept. 18, 1944, their big Sherman tanks heralding the liberation of Limburg province, where Geleen is located.

Years later, with the memory of that day still powerful, Bemelmans began a quest to know the names of the men who gave their lives in exchange for his freedom. "I hated that they were anonymous," he told me one evening as we talked in his living room, "that they passed by, and we didn't know who they were." It took Bemelmans 20 years to find the names of 61 American soldiers who died liberating this thumb of land wedged between Belgium and Germany. One of them was my uncle.

When I discovered last summer that the citizens of Geleen and neighboring Sittard were putting up a stone monument in remembrance of their liberators, I was startled. Hadn't Europe grown critical of America, angry over the war in Iraq, suspicious of a United States that many saw not as a benevolent superpower but as an arrogant bully? Hadn't this in turn provoked resentment in America and mutterings about European ingrates forgetting World War II? Now, those Europeans were inviting me to share in their remembrance of an uncle whose memory was almost lost to me. I knew I had to be there, not only in tribute to my uncle but to explore something about America, what the America of World War II shared with the America of Iraq and how they differed.

My father's brother, Joseph M. Lally, was a private first class in the armored infantry. Our family was never sure exactly how he died. An Army officer said a German sniper shot him as he got out of his vehicle. After the war, a buddy of Joey's murmured something about his being burned alive in a tank. A photo of a handsome young man in a uniform always sat on my grandparents' television set, but no one in the family ever talked much about him. He had died at 21, with no wife or child to remember him. In the Cleveland of the late 1950s, I grew up thinking of him as a victim of the war.

Arno Bemelmans told me he grew up thinking otherwise. He remembers venturing out of his house and across the fields that Sept. 18 after hearing news that the Americans were coming. Encountering forward units of the U.S. 2nd Armored Division, he tried out his English for the first time. The soldiers asked where the Germans were. Bemelmans pointed out the way.

For many years, he and his countrymen were immersed in rebuilding. Houses, factories and roads had been destroyed. The country had suffered deeply, with people killed not only by Germans but by British and American mistakes. In February 1944, U.S. warplanes accidentally bombed the town of Nijmegen, killing 200 civilians. Bemelmans and others told me they didn't blame the Americans, only the Germans and the evil of war.

For Bemelmans, Uncle Joey and his fellow Americans were heroes. "They left their homes to bring us peace and liberation," he said in his now fluent English. "These brave men fell far from home, never to return to the home of the brave."

That conviction drove Bemelmans to campaign for the monument that would carry the names of the liberators onward into the future. He is 78 now. No one with a memory of the liberation is young anymore. The personal recollections are dying out as surely in Geleen as they are in Cleveland. Bemelmans wanted to capture as much of the events of 1944 as he could, before they were lost to memory altogether.

American privacy laws complicated his task. He persisted, with help from a retired Connecticut police detective whose son happened to be a U.S. Special Forces officer assigned to NATO and living next door to Bemelmans, and whose other son lived near a member of Congress, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, in New Jersey. "I told my staff, 'We're putting on a full court press to identify the next of kin,' " says Frelinghuysen, a Vietnam veteran whose ancestors came from Holland -- in 1720. "I told them, 'If they're working so hard in the Netherlands, we're going to work just as hard on this side.' " A letter from Frelinghuysen's staff to the Cleveland Plain Dealer had brought me to the green where Bemelmans and the people of Geleen and Sittard unveiled the monument on that sunny Saturday.

The memorial is shaped like an H, to stand for Hell on Wheels . "Too macho," says Bemelmans, who prefers to think of the H as representing "herinnering," Dutch for remembrance, and "herdenking," Dutch for commemoration. He wants English speakers to think of "homes," for the ones the soldiers left behind.

NATO sent a band to the ceremony. The United States sent a brigadier general, and several servicemen bearing the American flag and a wreath to honor the dead. One sailor told me he felt honored to be there. These days, an American in uniform can feel uncomfortable in Europe, he told me. Many see only the uniform of the country that invaded Iraq.

A color guard from an ancient Dutch regiment raised flags and fired a salute as the monument was unveiled. Aging veterans of the Dutch partisan movement stood at attention in their maroon berets. Bemelmans read the names of the dead, pausing part way through as emotion overtook him. The band played "America the Beautiful."