Commemorating

People commemorate emotionally significant events from their public past. In Holland, for instance, several commemorations have marked the 1953 flood that took 1,400 lives and a plane crash in Amsterdam that killed 500 people. The end of World War II is commemorated each year on May 4, the day the German troops surrendered. The 50th anniversary of the war’s end was extensively celebrated in 1994 in France, and in 1995 in the Netherlands, in many towns and villages on the day the Allied troops entered there. Commemoration ceremonies were held in churches, at the foot of war monuments, at places where people had been shot or the executed buried. American and Canadian men of 70 years of age went to Europe and held reunions in the places where they had been as 20-year-old soldiers.