‘The Adopted’: I visited a WW2 soldier’s home in Michigan to see what he sacrificed
At his home in Lansing, his family shared the remarkable bond they have forged with the Dutch who adopted his grave.
At the end of Ferguson Street in Lansing, Michigan, there is no way through for cars, but a small pathway leads down to an open field, where a football scoreboard stands alone in front of a row of houses. It’s a good place to grow up, and a beautiful place to come home to if you live elsewhere. This is where ‘Thane’ lived — Hubert Thane Bauman II — before he left to join World War 2 in Europe. He was killed on November 27, 1944, leaving behind a mother and five sisters.
I came across this soldier’s story in May 2024, when I met the Dutch family who had adopted his grave in Limburg, the Netherlands. For several years I have followed the Dutch locals who bring flowers to the graves of American soldiers, ‘adopting’ them as a quasi family member. This started to happen as WW2 reached its bloody conclusion, when the U.S. army went in search of a place to bury tens of thousands of dead from battlefields in Germany, and the notorious Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.
Inside the Netherlands they found a small farming community, and through the bitterly cold winter months of 1944 and 1945, truckloads of bodies rolled in. I wanted to understand how this tiny Dutch village called Margraten became a home to America’s war dead, and why people continue to bring fresh flowers to the soldiers’ graves today.
Why adopt the grave of someone you never knew?
There are 8,301 U.S. soldier’s graves at the Netherlands-American Cemetery at Margraten and all of them are adopted through a local charity run by the community. Adopters pay €10 for the privilege and get a certificate with details such as their soldier’s name, state and regiment on it. Demand for graves is so high that the foundation closed its waiting list in 2021; more than 700 people are still waiting. This quiet tradition happens out of view from daily life and after months of following adopters, I wanted to hear an eye-witness account about the village and the field.
I was sent to meet a local man, called Huub, who was a curious 13-year-boy back in 1944 when the trucks rolled in. I visited him at his daughter’s home; I was worried whether he could sit through an on-camera interview for the film.
He drank black coffee and ate biscuits as we talked in Dutch about what unfolded in his village; his recall was incredibly vivid. The German body he saw hanging in a tree, the white blankets covering American corpses as they arrived in the field by the truckload, and the stench in the air. This was daily life in Margraten. His eyes flicked left and right as new stories came to mind, and he punctuated his accounts with cheeky jokes. After an hour, I brought the interview to an end; he could have easily gone on.
Huub, like many others from the region and beyond, were immensely grateful to the American soldiers who came to liberate them from Nazi Germany. He adopted Bauman’s grave in the 1980s when it became available. For 40 years he has visited the cemetery with his family several times a year, and each time places a bouquet of fresh flowers at the base of his headstone.
After the interview, I heard that the soldier’s family from Michigan visited Margraten every year to stay with Huub and his daughter, Maria. Two families, one soldier.
I contacted John Belen, Bauman’s nephew, via WhatsApp to introduce myself and my story and he told me about the day he received a Facebook message from the Netherlands. It was from a kind stranger to say she had been bringing flowers to his uncle’s grave, without him knowing. “You know, when you read something like that, you have to let it sink in,” John said. “And then she told me her father, Huub, had been doing this for 40 years. I had to let that sink in too.”
Hundreds of Americans travel to Margraten to pay respects to their family members, and many also meet up with their adopters. I wondered what this looked like: two families under one roof, honouring one soldier. It sounded strange. We went to find out. I met the Michigan family at their hotel in Amsterdam. I was grieving: dad had died a couple of weeks earlier in Ireland and I wasn’t sure I should pursue this story any longer. But I had committed myself to filming their visit to Huub and Maria’s home. Maybe I could learn something from them if I push on through? When they got to Maria’s house in Margraten it was the day before Memorial Day.
Five Americans from Bauman’s family had travelled; when they first visited the adopters in 2018 there were 10 in the party, all eager to connect.
We sat and talked about the connection between the two families. Both families talked about gratitude, reverence and kindness. They also spoke about love for him, the soldier — and his sacrifice — and for each other. We didn’t talk about war or the bloody WW2 endgame that played out just a few miles away. Love and kindness ruled. And it was hard to tell who was the more grateful: the adopters to their liberator’s family; or the liberator’s family for the pride, love and respect the adopters showed their uncle.
Both families had something to say. They were telling me: to remember and to learn, keep telling the stories, keep visiting and keep bringing flowers. Shout it from the rooftops, ring all the church bells. Don’t forget. Never forget.
I heard them and it made me reflect. How do you keep his story alive? What are you willing to do? How far are you willing you go? I had this longing to be among family while making this film. And then after the cameras stopped rolling in Margraten, the invite came. “Be careful, my friend,” John, the soldier’s nephew, said to me. “My family is pretty welcoming… and you’re in danger of becoming part of it!” He told me that if I really wanted to pursue this story I should come to Michigan and meet aunt Rita.
Who’s aunt Rita?
“She’s back there right now in Lansing, in the same house that my uncle left to come to the war,” he said. “His room is still there. You should really come and see it.” Such a journey seemed impossible for a small film project, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. This started as a Dutch story — something intimate — but it was now growing. It became clear to me that in order to understand the adoption program — why adopt the grave of someone you never knew? — and tell that story, I needed to be where the story starts.
When I arrived in Detroit on November 8th, I told the family that I was coming to meet their uncle ‘Thane’ — the soldier, brother, uncle, friend — to hear his story, and I told them anyone was welcome. Come one, come all. I wanted to learn who he was so I could complete the story of his grave adoption. I also wanted to hear how they came into contact with the Dutch family, and their first journey to the Netherlands in 2016.
I walked up Ferguson Street in Lansing, awash with its autumnal reds and oranges, and was greeted at the door by Theresa, Rita’s daughter. Inside, there was a fresh pot of coffee ready; in her pink kitchen Rita was busy preparing food for an influx of visitors: pulled pork sliders, sweet and sour meatballs and a peanut butter sheet cake. She could feed an army. They all came to talk to me. We were strangers in the Netherlands, but now I was family. Over the hours we spent together, the soldier emerged. His cheekiness, humour and charm, visible and intact through the stories they told and in the letters and postcards they shared.
In the details of his writings was a man, not a number. He liked to tease his sisters. You wouldn’t have known from his writing where he was going because there was no fear.
I felt like a time traveller visiting his home, particularly as a few weeks earlier I stood by his grave in Margraten as a cemetery worker rubbed Normandy sand into his name. Now I was visiting the Lansing train station where he waved goodbye. One family member turned up with a small chess set he posted back from a German raid. Underneath the box, a name and a regiment.
We walked upstairs to the bedroom he left to join the war. The wallpaper was peeling off in the morning light. We didn’t know whether to stand or kneel.
At my feet, a small trunk with his name on top, and inside his books, like he was about to come home. The war was raging across Europe, the death toll was mounting as Adolf Hitler’s war machine rolled across the continent. I imagined Thane looking into the back yard, like I was now, or walking down the side path to the football field at the bottom of Ferguson Street. I walked in his shoes; he must have dreamt of coming home. And what a lovely home to come back to.
I visited dad’s grave a few weeks after I returned home from Michigan, in Tipperary, Ireland, and in the hotel I stayed in beside the shores of Loch Derg the owner told me a story about local boys who didn’t return from World War 2. A family of four boys to be exact, who joined the war just like Thane. Only two of them came home. Many soldiers exaggerated their ages to enlist in the Armed Forces, he told me. They weren’t going to sit back and watch, not from Ireland, and not from Michigan. They went.
It occurred to me that through all of this — meeting Huub and his family in Margraten, the soldier’s family in Lansing, walking around Thane’s neighbourhood, the visit to the converted train station where he said goodbye, and then returning to the cemetery — I was following him from the cradle to the grave.
The bond between the families of those who liberated the Netherlands and those who lived under occupation is incredibly strong. Nothing will come between them. And it’s hard not to feel this burning sense of responsibility.
You can’t possibly understand any war unless you see the people it affected, the families, even if it is 80 years later. The loss reverberates through time. And in homes like Rita’s, with its stunning pink kitchen, and all its ornaments — and all the love, warmth and reverence — it was here that Europe’s call for help was answered.
I sat on the Delta flight home deep in thought. We don’t talk enough about kindness and reverence today, those hidden acts, or the beautiful human connection that a loss can cultivate. We should promote them, but we don’t. There is noise all around us but no one sees the 93-year-old bringing flowers to his liberator; he is a quiet hero in my eyes. And he knows the lessons of war are still for learning and we shouldn’t forget.
People are afraid we will forget, but I’ve seen what two families — and schools — are willing to do to learn, share and keep the memory alive. I went to Michigan to better understand this act of adoption for myself. Now, I’m left wondering: who is adopted here? The Netherlands adopted these American soldiers and gave them a home; the Dutch family adopted their soldier, Thane, and his family in Michigan, too. The American family adopted the Dutch in return. And then there is me.
Am I adopted too?
Before the plane landed at Schiphol I had another thought: all of us are connected by the decision of this one man to go to war. Thane was only 23 years old when he died in a village called Kirchberg in Germany, six months before victory was declared in Europe. When his death was announced, the Army visited his mother and told her on the doorstep of her home, as was protocol. Behind her was Rita, an 11-year-old girl. She told me how short the conversation was. He was gone.
But Thane knew what he signed up for, even though he had a way out of the war if he’d wanted to take it. In my interview with her, Rita told me that her father died of polio before the war, leaving their mum to raise six children alone. Being the only male in a family of five sisters meant Thane was exempt from joining the conflict raging across Europe, that was the US government policy at the time. Thane didn’t have to go and fight the Nazis at all, he had his ticket out.
But he went anyway.
COME AND SUPPORT MY FILM! I need to go back to Michigan to finish this story in May, 2025. I am launching a Kickstarter for THE ADOPTED soon. You can join in any of the rewards categories and earn: a redeemable hug, a digital film poster, an exclusive flower bouquet workshop in the Netherlands & even become an executive director or associate producer on the film with your name in the credits next to mine! Amazing, right? Sign up to the Kickstarter (launching soon) here.
