Eighty years after the American Army liberated his hometown of Maastricht on September 13-14, 1944, my father still remembers the day. This is his story of his liberation.

Only six years old, he lived with his parents and older sisters in a small petit bourgeois home in the neighborhood of Wyck, east of the River Maas (aka Meuse). The old St. Servaas Bridge leads from the heart of the city to Wyck and the train station. The Germans had laid dynamite along the bridge but were also using it as an escape route from the Allies, who had liberated Brussels ten days earlier.

The people of Maastricht could anticipate their liberation with mixed feelings. Obviously they wanted to be free of the Nazi occupation, but the process was worrisome. They could end up in a battleground and had, indeed, already suffered deaths from Allied bombers who mistook their target. The German Army or the Nazis could decide to make an example of them or take reprisals for some act of resistance out on them. Horrible stories were circulating and not all of them were only rumors.

So my grandparents kept their young son inside. The entire neighborhood was inside, waiting quietly so as not to attract any attention from trigger-happy or vengeful troops. They could hear the noise of war to the south and east. Then they heard a tank clattering up a street. Tanks make a tremendous amount of noise on a cobbled street when no civilian has been able to drive an automobile for years. The brave peeked out the window.

No one recognized this tank. They were sadly familiar with the SS and the Wehrmacht and their armament. It wasn’t one of theirs, but it could belong to an as yet unknown German unit.

The tank stopped at a crossroads. Its gun turret swung around. The hatch opened.

A soldier unfolded himself out of the turret. He struck a match and lit a cigarette.

People immediately ran out of their homes to greet their liberators. Some carried bottles of alcohol they’d been saving for this very day for years. How did they know that this tank belonged to the Allies and had come to liberate them? Because no German soldier would ever smoke on duty like that.

Many others things happened in the city of Maastricht that day. Some families were bereaved, many were jubilant. But that’s what one six-year-old boy remembered of his liberation from Nazi occupation.