Mother and son bring a little bit of home to father lost in World War II

Dec. 10—Longtime Shafter resident Fran Florez was at the dedication ceremony Saturday morning at the Kern County World War II Veterans Memorial in Bakersfield.

The Second World War played a crucial role in her life, and Florez, now 79, felt she had to be at the dedication.

Her own father, U.S. Army Pfc. Lawrence M. Muro, was killed in action on April 13, 1945, less than one month before the end of the Second World War in Europe. His daughters, Frances and Isabel, were still very young when he lost his life.

"My dad didn't come back," Fran Florez said.

Indeed, Private Muro's remains were never transported back home. Like thousands of other American GIs, his body was interred at the American Cemetery in the Netherlands, where his grave remains to this day, marked by a white stone cross, in a broad field of crosses.

The Netherlands American Cemetery is the only American military cemetery in Holland, where more than 8,300 servicemen and woman are buried.

Several years ago, Florez was able to visit her father's grave on the European continent, although it was not something she had planned. She was accompanied to France by her son, Dean Florez, who was serving in the role of state senator at the time.

One day, at Dean's invitation, they took a train north from Paris to the Netherlands.

"He told me, 'We're going to the cemetery,'" she remembered.

"I was only 2 years old when he died," she said. "I didn't know my dad.

"I didn't expect to be emotional."

After a tour of the beautiful facility, and after learning about the history of the cemetery, mother and son made their way down the rows of crosses and Stars of David to a cross marked with the name they were searching for.

"So many crosses, so many markers," Fran Florez recalled. "Then I saw his cross, his name, his rank, his date of death ... and I just lost it."

After all the years that had passed, the daughter finally was standing at her father's grave. And she couldn't hold back the tears.

"I imagined my mom," she said. "A young wife, with two little girls."

After a while, her son pulled a bag of dirt from his jacket, soil he had carried all the way from the fertile San Joaquin Valley.

"Mom, I brought dirt from home, from Kern County," she remembered him saying. "We need to put it on grandpa's grave."

And so the two of them sprinkled dirt from home atop the grave of their loved one, who had been buried for decades in the soil of this faraway land.

In some beautiful, mysterious way, it felt like her daddy was finally home, that this father and grandfather who never had the chance to know his daughters and his grandson was, in some small way, back home again.

Reporter Steven Mayer can be reached at 661-395-7353. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter: @semayerTBC.