Graven Stichting
Brabant

General

After four years of German occupation, Eindhoven was liberated on 18 September 1944, as part of the military operation Market Garden. Since that time we have lived in a free country, in peace and prosperity.

It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to live under foreign occupation or in a country where the authorities suppress freedom. Especially for us in the Western world. Specifically for younger generations who have heard about a past with war and occupation only from stories.

And yet, freedom is still and increasingly important. Freedom can never be taken for granted, that much is clear from the stories about refugees and asylum seekers.

This makes it important to remember how our freedom was recovered. To know what it was like and how much freedom and peace mean to us. It is necessary to ask yourself what peace means in this day and age and what meaning remembrance can have for all of us.

Vision

The Foundation is dedicated to promoting the adoption of graves of allied liberators by civilians, schools, institutions and interested parties.

Several adoption programs were developed for this purpose. Not only individual graves of liberators can be adopted (this will mostly be done by interested private persons) but also various graves of liberators who fought together in the same army unit.

For example, a school can use the adoption of several graves of one army unit to address what happened to that unit and make this into a teaching program or further explore the events that happened to that unit. This adoption possibility is of course also open to companies or institutions.

Purpose/Adoption

It is interesting for the adopting party to find out who is buried where and more importantly, what did he do, where did he die or where did he live?

This information is not available through the Foundation or at the cemetery. The purpose should be to recreate, as it were, the life of the deceased and possibly get in touch with his surviving family. The Foundation aims at several forms of adoption and research, not only the person himself but also his unit or his comrades.

Because the database is still new, in the beginning it will take time to search for and add to information.