My name is Mieke Kirkels. Welcome to my website.
Following an early retirement, I moved from the city of Rotterdam to a village called Margraten, located east of Maastricht in the southern province of Limburg.
In 2008, the national oral history project ‘Heritage of WWII – Eyewitness stories’ was launched in the Netherlands. Together with the local heritage foundation, I started the ‘Fields of Margraten’ project to uncover the history of the American cemetery in the village.
From local farmers I learned that African American soldiers burried 20,000 soldiers on their farmland beginning in September 1944.
As an oral historian and project manager, I have worked since then to highlight the contributions of African American soldiers to the liberation of the Netherlands over 80 years ago. For some time, however, I was unable to trace any records in Dutch history books or archives about African American soldiers and their service in the segregated U.S. military.
In 2009, it was only by shear chance that I met an African American veteran who was troubled to hear that the Dutch were not aware of this history and said,
“People should know!”
That was the crux of what has kept me writing about what I call ‘Black Liberators’.
Read more on the page “About me“.
