Becklingen

Yesterday I spoke with a Knight’s Cross holder about his last battles fighting the Allies at the invasion of Normandy, how he was captured in the Falaise Pocket and brought to America as a POW.

Then, after an ample meal outdoors in the garden with him and his wife, I drove a little over an hour to the British cemetery Becklingen. While George Cone and I were travelling through Germany interviewing tank veterans last year, our GPS mysteriously directed us here while by all rights we should have still been on the Autobahn.

It was dark and raining, but George brought some matches into the cemetery and checked the first headstones, which were British and Polish aviators shot down early in the war. George also recalled that there had been a large tank battle nearby at the end of the war. Since we were visiting tankers, we were sure someone there wanted his story told too. We stopped in a gas station on the way back to the Autobahn and ran into some British MP’s stationed there. They didn’t know much about it – “some World War 2 cemetery,” they said.

Yesterday was half sunny-half cloudy as I pulled up to the lonely cemetery. It doesn’t expect any visitors at all, even from the British troops stationed there as there’s no parking lot to speak of in the rough dirt outside the gate. This made me very sad.

I took my video camera and walked through the marble archway at the entrance. I expected to find mostly aviators. Within a few steps, though, I found British tankers, 18-years-old, killed in April 1945. As you’ll remember, the war ended here May 8, 1945.

I burst into tears – I couldn’t help myself.

I walked along the row, seeing the messages engraved on their stones by their grieving loved ones. I had just been able to get myself somewhat under control when I saw one killed in early May, 1945 and burst into tears again.

Then I walked along the next row. There was something very personal about being on European soil and seeing the graves of Allied soldiers who were killed there, far away from home. I realized that that young boy truly did give his life for me. How do I ever properly show gratitude for such a tremendous, horrible, honorable sacrifice? And for the suffering of the parents, wives, siblings and children they left behind?

I once said to a veteran that war kills soldiers indiscriminately, but he corrected me, and said no, it’s mostly the good ones who are killed.

I couldn’t stop crying as I walked down the long row and up the next – still tankers. Then the next row, and the next, and the next. The caretakers came, and I felt kind of strange to be sharing these naked emotions with strangers, but I cried still and talked to the dead boys and thanked them. And there were more rows and more.

Soon I realized that almost the entire cemetery was filled with hundreds of boys killed in battles in April and May 1945, and not an insignificant number killed in June 1945.

June?

Space ran out in my camera, and then the battery died before I could film them all.

I felt really bad leaving them. I get the feeling that no one really comes here at all. Now that their parents are dead and siblings are mostly gone, and the children who barely knew them are not young either, who will remember them now?