More than 100 people are on the waiting list

To become caretakers for graves of fallen American soldiers in a small Dutch town called Margraten. 

This is the most beautiful story I ever read. Written by Ian Shapira for Washington Post. More beautiful than the story of Vincent Speranza who tells it himself so humbly, so grippingly and so touchingly about how he delivered a helmet of beer to stricken soldiers against the wishes and under fire from his own commanding officer and against common sense, to have the town name a beer after him with its own ceramic mug in the shape of an American helmet.

At Margraten each grave of an American soldier is adopted by a family and tended. At the annual ceremony 6,000 people pour into the 65 acre burial ground situated next to an orchard, the town near the German border. 

Seventy-year old Arthur Chotlin went to Margraten from Annapolis, Md to meet the couple caring for his father's grave and was awestruck by the devotion of the Dutch to this project. Chotlin was the only American to speak on Sunday.

“What would cause a nation recovering from losses and trauma of their own to adopt the sons and daughters of another nation?” “And what would keep that commitment alive for all of these years, when the memory of that war has begun to fade? It is a unique occurrence in the history of civilization.”

The old man stood in front of his father's grave of Army Staff Sgt. Max Chotin with its Star of David headstone, teary-eyed, next to Boy Naajkens the Dutch health food store who adopted it in 2006 and had tended the grave since. This was the first time they paid their respect together. 

Comments:  allisoncox 8:44 AM MDT

Last summer, while in the Netherlands I went to the Liberation Museumhttp://www.bevrijdingsmuseum.nl/basis.aspx?Tid=746... and our tour guide was a man who was a 5 year old boy when the American planes first arrived. He described running out of his house and looking up at the sky for 2 hours at the constant stream of planes. WWII and the battles that were fought at this time became a life long obsession; his love and gratitude for the Americans who served was constantly bubbling over. Meeting him was one of the highlights of my 21 day European trip.