On this day, we honor and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country. But what happens when a soldier, sailor, Marine, or airman dies overseas, and is buried there without friends or family to know the actual person eternally sleeping under a headstone?

As we have recognized before on Memorial Day, the cemeteries that hold our honored dead are managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission, which take great care in maintaining the grounds and graves. But in a sea of near-identical headstones, the individual that each one represents is often nothing more than a name and a unit. With the advent of databases and the internet, people can look up those names and faces quite rapidly. But what if the face was already there?

That is the drive behind the Faces of Margraten project. Margraten is the home of the Netherlands American Cemetery, and the people of the Netherlands have a passionate desire to honor those who are buried there. As the ABMC website states, Dutch families have been honoring these soldiers since the end of World War II.

Unique to the cemetery is the connection with the Dutch people. Since 1945 members of the local community have adopted the grave sites of our fallen. They bring flowers to the cemetery and research the life of the service member as a way to honor their sacrifice. Today, the Foundation for Adopting Graves at the American Cemetery Margraten manages this program. With a similar intention the Foundation United Adopters American War Graves created a program known as The Faces of Margraten. This group collects photos of our fallen, and sponsors a bi-annual event at the cemetery during Dutch Memorial Day weekend. More than 3,000 photos are on display that weekend next to headstones and the Walls of the Missing, bringing visitors face-to-face with their liberators.

The Faces of Margraten project was begun by Sebastiaan Vonk, who feels personally connected to these American servicemen.

“My relatives and ancestors suffered a lot during World War II and they were so grateful for their liberation,” Sebastiaan Vonk, a 31-year-old Dutch chair of Fields of Honor, told Fox News Digital in an interview on Friday.

“The next generations are also very grateful that these men and women came over to fight here in a war that wasn’t necessarily a war they had to fight.”

Vonk founded Faces of Margraten to connect the grateful people of the Netherlands today with the Americans who fought and died in the effort to liberate their nation — and all of Europe — from Adolf Hitler’s Germany during World War II.

It’s a remarkable international effort to adopt and honor 10,000 American GIs who are buried or memorialized today at the Netherlands American Cemetery in the small community of Margraten.

Dutch families have already “adopted” all 10,000 soldiers. Vonk said there is even “a waiting list of people looking to adopt,” should another adoptive person or family pass along the opportunity.

Vonk is now leading an effort to pair each name at the cemetery with the face of that U.S. war hero, while expanding the effort to five other American battlefield cemeteries in Europe.

It’s an effort, he said, to “humanize” the cost of war and the sacrifices made by the United States.

They have 8,651 photographs to date.

Vonk and the adoptive families of the Netherlands are still seeking photos of the 1,400 other American heroes buried in their country.

The photos — the Faces of Margraten — are placed next to their adopted GI’s grave or name for five days each year. But their memories are honored by the Dutch people all year long.

According to their website, the Faces of Margraten began in 2015 with 3,300 photos, and has grown with more photographs every single year since. Vonk has helped co-author a book called “Faces of Margraten” to help tell the stories of the soldiers who are buried in the Netherlands American Cemetery, with the hope of continuing to collect more photographs.

At the beginning of this project, the foundation possessed personal photos of approximately 2,000 soldiers who either have been buried in or are memorialized at the Margraten Cemetery. It, therefore, is aware that it will not be possible to decorate each grave or name with a personal photo. Nevertheless, we hope that many other photos will be found. In order to reach this goal, solid communication about the project in both the Netherlands and the United States is fundamental. By generating awareness of the project, the foundation hopes to reach adopters, relatives of soldiers, fellow researchers, and veterans’ associations who all may have photos and information of those buried in Margraten. Currently, more than 5,000 photos are available.

The foundation considers it to be important to continuously reflect on the sacrifices made by these American soldiers as the current international context still shows us that freedom cannot be taken for granted. Being aware of the human costs of freedom is important in preventing possible conflicts in the future. The Fields of Honor Foundation hopes to enhance this awareness through this project. In particular for younger generations it is important to make them aware of the destruction of war. After all, they have never experienced World War Two or any other war, and the generation who has and can tell them about that war rapidly passes away. The foundation, therefore, also would like to actively involve schools in the proximity of the cemetery.

And now, as Vonk said in his most recent interview, he wants to expand the Faces of Margraten to more cemeteries.

The Faces of Margraten project has been so successful that Vonk and his Fields of Honor Foundation recently expanded the program to five other American military cemeteries in three other countries.

The Ardennes American Cemetery and Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery are both in Belgium; the Epinal American Cemetery and Lorraine American Cemetery are both in France; and the Luxembourg American Cemetery is in Luxembourg.

Many of the American heroes in those graves have already been adopted by local individuals or families.

The goal is to make sure that all 42,000 American war heroes memorialized in those cemeteries, killed during the liberation of Europe, find an individual or family to adopt them.

And, of course, he hopes to pair photos with every GI at each cemetery.

“Just the fact that there is a waiting list to adopt a grave at Margraten and the fact that thousands of other graves have already been adopted in other cemeteries is very telling about how people in Europe still feel about the American liberators today,” said Vonk.

“They are grateful and, speaking for myself, inspired by what these Americans did for us.”

They came from another continent to fight for our freedom and paid the highest sacrifice. American heroes. In Dutch Margraten more than 8300 are buried. We’ve adopted one grave and today paid our respect during the emotional #MemorialDay #America #usa pic.twitter.com/QjrvzNHV2N

— Beata Bruggeman-Sękowska (@BruggemanSekows) May 26, 2024

Imagine if there was a movement by young people in THIS country who wished to adopt a grave, regularly bring flowers to that grave, and knew the face and biography of the person they are honoring? What a different country we would have. What an inspiring example Sebastiaan Vonk and the people of Margarten are setting for the rest of us.

Featured image: Netherlands American Cemetery via the American Battle Monuments Commission Flickr account, photo by ABMC/Robert Uth, cropped, public domain