Let’s continue with the story of my father’s liberation from the Nazis 75 years ago in Maastricht. He was 6 years old, so his memories are the impression of a child.

He remembers that American Army trucks and equipment rolled past his home day and night for days. The Dutch, who had been on short rations for years, were amazed at that wealth and at the organization of the American First Army. Why, the Americans even brought their own bridge to replace the centuries old St Servaas bridge that the Germans had blown when they retreated! Nonetheless, an American officer apologized to some local dignitaries that it took his engineers more than 12 hours to lay that Bailey Bridge across the River Maas. They were usually much quicker, he said, but they hadn’t slept in days.

The local Dutch found all this wealth and efficiency reassuring enough to definitively celebrate their Liberation with a Te Deum. Maastricht was an intensely Catholic town in the 1940’s, and the accompanying procession lasted for hours.

But the locals did have cause to worry that the occupiers might return. Maastricht was near the end of the Allies’ triumphal wave of liberation that summer. Only a few days later, on September 17, British paratroopers landed a hundred miles to the north outside of Arnhem to begin the catastrophe of the “bridge too far” that was the failure of Operation Market Garden. The people of Arnhem and all of the Netherlands north of the rivers had another eight months of a punitive occupation and man-made famine ahead of them.

If you’re interested in what it was like to be a Dutch civilian living under Nazi occupation and on the front lines of the battles for the end of the war, I highly recommend Robert Matzen’s Dutch Girl. It’s a biography of Audrey Hepburn as a teenager living in Arnhem and the nearby village of Velp during the war with an excellent description of the context of any Dutch civilian’s life during the time. There’s even a Dutch-Paris link. Audrey did volunteer work for a local doctor at the hospital and with his resistance work of rescuing fugitives. That Dr Visser ‘t Hooft was the brother of the Pastor Visser ‘t Hooft who helped Dutch-Paris from his position as president of the World Council of Churches in Formation in Geneva.