Louise Neal’s father died when she was less than 5 years old.
It was near the end of World War II, and the retired Bangor Area School District art teacher’s father was far from home, in France, helping liberate Europe from the grasp of Nazis.
A chance meeting last month, and the kindness of a stranger, helped Neal see where her father is buried.
Neal was visiting Arlington National Cemetery with a group of retired Pennsylvania teachers the weekend of Oct. 18. Neal and about two dozen other visitors got detoured to Alexandria, Virginia, during the trip due to a No Kings protest in the Washington area and the federal government shutdown.
Sitting in a restaurant before heading to the cemetery, Neal and a stranger, Niek Hendrix, struck up a conversation. Neal said she and Hendrix, who lives in the Netherlands, were exchanging small talk.
“Then I said about my dad being killed in France. I was 4½ when this happened,” Neal said. The Saylorsburg resident said she has visited France and Italy, where her father also served during the war, but the distance to travel from where she was in France prevented her from getting to his grave.
“He said, ‘If you give me your email, I might be able to get a picture of his grave,’ ” Neal said.
Within three hours, she said, Hendrix had emailed information about her father’s burial place. Pvt. Emory L. Kreeger was fatally wounded Feb. 5, 1945, in Oberhoffein, France, and is buried in Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial outside Lorraine.
“What I find so fascinating, here they are strangers and the circumstances that led them to meet,” said Norma Shriver, a retired Easton Area School District teacher who organized the trip to Arlington. Like Neal, she belongs to the Northampton County Chapter of the Pennsylvania Association of School Retirees.
The website findagrave.com included short articles on Kreeger, with an account of his death and burial in France, from newspapers in York County, where he lived before being inducted June 16, 1944, into the Army.
What did Neal think when Hendrix provided her with information about a father she had hardly known, and whose burial site she had never seen?
“Just kind of like, wow, I don’t believe this,” she said. “I think the thing that surprised me the most is so many people are interested in this.”
Hendrix, via email and FaceTime from his home in Ospel, Netherlands, said: “I met Louise in Alexandria, and when I heard that Louise never visited her father’s grave, I told her I would reach out to find a photo of her father’s grave. I was astonished they did not find it online.”
Hendrix has a fond and strong connection to American servicemen.
His village, Ospel, was the scene for a bloody battle in 1944 between the Allies and Germans.
Hendrix said his father was 17 years old when American soldiers like Kreeger liberated him from the Axis forces. Hendrix, who is a poultry farmer living on the same land his father tended, researched the liberation of Ospel with a military historian, Wesley Johnston.
He said after the research, his family built a memorial on the farm that contains the names of 54 Americans who were killed during the Ospel liberation.
Hendrix helped create a 2020 documentary for Amazon Prime Video called “Some Will Never Return,” which honors fallen soldiers buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten.
“Two friends of mine who make documentaries were impressed with my research, memorials, etc.,” Hendrix said. “They told me they wanted to make a video on account of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands and Europe, and the adoption of the graves program at Margraten cemetery.”
Hendrix said he obtained a grant for the film through the American embassy in The Hague. When the grant money ran out, Hendrix and his family paid for the balance of production costs, he said.
“We will never forget the sacrifices of these men,” Hendrix said. “There is no greater honor then to live on in the hearts of those who were liberated.”
Epilogue: The day after she met Hendrix, Neal joined several veterans, including Dan Chiavaroli and Nick Ackerman, for a wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. They recounted their Arlington trip and service experiences Thursday during a Veterans Day ceremony at Gracedale sponsored by Memorial Library of Nazareth and Vicinity.
Veterans Day, Nov. 11, formerly Armistice Day, commemorates the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. The federal legal holiday, observed on the fourth Monday in October during the mid-1970s, reverted to Nov. 11 in 1978.
Contact Morning Call reporter Anthony Salamone at asalamone@mcall.com.