The book ‘Kinderen van zwarte bevrijders’ [Children of Black liberators] by Mieke Kirkels was published in April 2017. She writes about the touching untold history of liberators’ children in the Netherlands who have dark complexions.
As children of Black American soldiers, they were all too clearly recognizable as ‘little Americans’ in the then ‘white’ Limburg.
This book tells their story and that of their fathers who served in a strictly racially segregated American liberation army.
The first liberators’ children of our country were born in Limburg in 1945. About seventy of them had a dark complexion: their biological fathers were Black American soldiers. Service troops mainly provided supplies from Limburg to the front-line troops, but in the military history of WWII, the 900,000 Black Americans who helped liberate Europe are barely mentioned. Eyewitnesses often speak for the first time about the stationing of Black liberators and the humiliations they suffered at the hands of white Americans.
The Black Americans were embraced as liberators by the people of Limburg, but acceptance of the children they fathered was less smooth. These ‘illegitimate’ children of Black liberators were initially seen as being exotic or as ‘missionary children’ in the white, predominantly Catholic province of Limburg, but they did not have an easy life later in their youth. Questions about their biological fathers also remained unanswered for a long time: none of the twelve who tell their story in the digital book had ever heard of the liberation army in which their fathers had served, which was racially segregated until 1948. The background of segregation in the US Army, which few people in our country are aware of, is also discussed.
‘Kinderen van zwarte bevrijders’ [Children of Black liberators] describes a moving and largely unknown history, and is illustrated with many unseen photographs from the liberation period.
ISBN 978 94 6004 321 5