What happens when you lose your freedom and the people who eventually get it back for you are no longer alive to thank?
Set during the horrors of World War II, Remember Us by Robert Edsel—#1 New York Times bestselling author of The Monuments Men—opens in Limburg, a small, rural province at the southern tip of the Netherlands. In the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 1940, Hitler’s forces rolled through the city, shattering more than 100 years of peace in the Netherlands. The country fell one week later. The Dutch lived under German occupation for four-and-a-half years, until September 1944, when American forces reached Limburg, the last Western province liberated before the Allied advance was slammed to a halt by Nazi Germany.
Just like The Monuments Men, Remember Us is a true ensemble it follows its seven main characters over a six-year span, zeroing in on women such as Frieda van Schäik, a fifteen-year-old from a small village in the southern Netherlands who watched the German tanks roll past on the first day of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg of Western Europe; and 1st Sergeant Jeff Wiggins of the 960th Quartermaster Company, a segregated Black unit, who escaped the poverty and racism of Alabama (including the local Klan coming with torches to lynch his father) by lying about his age and enlisting at seventeen, and whose assignment is another indignity in a lifetime of indignities—digging graves.
This story, rich with drama and suspense, shows us how this terrible war continues to affect us today, and reminds us of the power and vital necessity of true service in the midst of terror and loss. Remember Us is exactly the book we all need—a reminder that humanity knows no national or racial boundaries, and that our greatest acts are not those we do for ourselves, but for each other. Drawing on letters, diaries, and other historical records, Edsel gives us a moving and compelling story of World War II that captures both the horrors of war and the enduring promise of the human spirit, Why did the people of this small panhandle of land, squeezed between the great powers of Europe, react so differently? Why are its citizens so dedicated to remembrance? And at a time when Americans are arguing about their role in the world, what can Margraten teach us about honor, sacrifice, and the bonds that tie us, forever, to each other?
