by Jonas Beiler
Finally, after the service, everyone usually returns to the place of the funeral to share a meal. The day passes, and while the families grieve and miss their loved one, their family and community are there to support them, to remind them that the cycle of life will continue. This is the strength of the Amish community, this sense of support and closeness, and the firm belief that they will one day be reunited with their loved ones.
THE DAY of the girls’ funerals came, and volunteer firefighter Rob Beiler found himself at Bart Fire Station once again. The men there were still reeling from what they had experienced. Most of them had not yet returned to work, so Rob and the Gap Fire Company had been handling calls in both areas while their friends from Bart recovered. Rob was the officer on the crew, and he had five men with him. Driving back over those roads, pulling into the station, and walking inside had transported Rob back to that tragic day once again. There was an eerie feel to the place and a sense of déjà vu. But he busied himself taking care of some odds and ends around the fire hall that the Bart firefighters hadn’t had a chance to do.
For a while, Rob and his crew just sat in the hall, waiting for calls. These fire halls are so much more than emergency response buildings—they hold auctions, banquets, and community gatherings. The firemen have fund-raisers and serve meals in the fire truck bays. The fire halls are often close to one of the local churches and serve as central meeting places for many community events.
Some of the state troopers who had been at the schoolhouse the day of the shooting came back out to the Bart fire hall to honor the funeral processions that would soon pass by. They waited there, looking out of place without their uniforms. They looked like normal men, which in some ways they were, but there was also a quiet strength to them. Some of the troopers spoke to the firefighters about the event that brought them there, while others sat quietly, preferring not to talk about it.
A couple of troopers even had Amish children on their laps—they bounced the kids on their knees or gave them chewing gum. State police were talking with Amish women, something rarely seen, as usually the Amish men deal with any figures of authority. Rob shook his head in amazement. The tragedy seemed to be turning everything on its head, bringing everyone even closer together.
After Rob was there for a while he heard people gathering outside, so he went out front to see what was going on. It was a normal October day. The air was cool, and even in those few short days since the shooting, the trees had changed quite a bit, looking even more colorful. As he looked down the road he saw a sight that put a lump in his throat: a long line of Amish horse and buggies. The funeral processions had begun and would continue throughout the day. Thirty to forty buggies, sometimes stretching on around the corner, farther than he could see. The horses clip-clopped down the road at a slow, somber pace, and the Amish people inside, dressed in black, stared straight ahead. Sometimes an Amish man would look over at the fire hall and nod in recognition or tip his hat. The Amish had a great appreciation for what the emergency services had done on October 2. Each long line of buggies, led by mounted state troopers and a black funeral home vehicle, wound its way through the Nickel Mines countryside toward the Amish graveyard in Georgetown.
Each of the processions passed by the home of Charles Roberts.
The first funeral was for seven-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersole, the little girl who would sometimes cry before going to school. The second carried Marian Fisher, thirteen years old, the girl who had asked to be shot first. Finally, during the last funeral of that Thursday, Mary Liz and Lena Miller, the sisters whose viewing Anne and I had attended, were carried to their resting place. It was difficult for Rob to watch those solemn mourners pass by time and time again, undaunted in their determination to complete the ceremony honoring the girls’ passage into heaven and into the presence of God.
As each of the processions made its way past the fire hall, people started coming out of their houses. Cars pulled over to the sides of the road as their drivers got out and stood there, respectfully waiting. All of the men lining the streets took their hats off. Rob felt himself getting more and more emotional as he thought of the five girls.
Members of a motorcycle gang came walking up the street in full biker gear, wearing leather chaps and black leather jackets, looking tough and very much out of place. But they stopped there beside the fire hall as the first procession passed, paying their respects. One of the guys came over and started talking to Rob. He had tattoos up and down his arms and looked as hard as a rock, impenetrable. He was the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to mess with, or even make eye contact with. But Rob wasn’t intimidated by tough exteriors.
“Where are you guys from?” Rob asked.
“We drove in from Carlisle this morning,” he said quietly. Carlisle is a small town in central Pennsylvania, approximately an hour and a half drive from Nickel Mines. “We heard there might be some protestors here, so we wanted to show up and stand between them and the Amish.”
Rob nodded his head in appreciation. He had heard about the possibility of protestors against the Amish lifestyle.
You can’t judge people by the way they look, Rob thought to himself. This man had gathered together a group of his friends and traveled nearly one hundred miles round-trip to protect people he didn’t even know. Their black Harley-Davidsons had rumbled across the state on a mission. The longer Rob talked to the biker, the more he was drawn into his story.
“This sure is something,” the biker said to Rob as the processions continued going by.
Rob nodded his head.
“You know,” the motorcyclist continued, “I had a son that was killed by a drunk driver seven years ago.”
He paused, looked at the ground and shook his head. Rob could tell the hurt and pain lingered close to the surface. Something clicked inside Rob, a realization as to exactly why this man had come so far to mourn alongside the Amish. Common experience can often join people of extremely different backgrounds.
Then the biker looked Rob in the eyes.
“I have never forgiven the guy that killed my son,” he said in a distant, solid voice that seemed to be softening. “Never forgiven him. You know what? Maybe I should. If these folks can forgive that man that shot their little girls, maybe I should forgive the guy that killed my son, too. Look at this,” he said, gesturing with his tattoo-covered arms at the endless line of buggies rolling by. “Just look at them.”
The two men stood there, somehow connected by the long procession. This type of connecting took place throughout the community that day, as nearly everyone stopped to reflect not only on the tragic death of five innocent Amish girls but also on the atmosphere of forgiveness that became more apparent with each passing hour, and on the Amish community’s determination to remain resilient.
“Maybe I should forgive, too,” the man said again.
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ANNA Mae would be buried on Friday, the last of the Amish funerals. She, too, would be carried in a procession of buggies from the funeral service attended by friends and family, down Mine Road, past the Roberts’s home, past the Bart Fire Station, and would finally arrive at the Amish graveyard surrounded by a white fence.
The remaining five girls all survived, and after the shootings a local Amish woman would find small shoots of pure white lilac, a spring flower that had somehow pushed its way up through the fall fields and into the sunshine. Miracles?
Everyone looked for miracles in the days following the shootings, and the miracles themselves seemed eager to be found, waiting out in the open, causing even the most callous hearts to stop and reflect. As some of the visiting women had run from the schoolhouse just prior to the shooting, they glanced over their shoulders to see an angel resting above the school. The schoolteacher who survived the incident would have a dream that included a vision of her school filled with angels. And, for the skeptics, a more concrete miracle: one of the girls would survive a shot to the head, defying all the doctors’ forecasts. Allowed by the doctors to “go
home to die,” she lived on.
Anna Mae’s would not be the final funeral of the affair—on Saturday, October 7, nearly one week after the dominoes of that event were set in motion, Charles Carl Roberts IV was laid to rest. He was buried next to his daughter Elise’s memorial in their family plot at Georgetown United Methodist Church. The sky was gray, and the seventy or so mourners gathered under a small green tent for the service. Charlie’s wife and three small children, ages seven, five, and one, were there.
Approximately thirty of the mourners were Amish. They had decided that their presence alongside Charlie’s wife was important. The men removed their hats while the prayers were said, then shook hands with everyone at the end of the service. Their outward expressions of forgiveness, at least pertaining to Charlie’s death, were complete. But as one Amish man would say, they forgave, and when they woke up the next morning, they would forgive again.
According to a story in one of our local newspapers, one bystander—Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain from Colorado who attended the service—was overwhelmed by the Amish support of the Roberts family.
“It’s the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed,” Porter, who had come to Pennsylvania to offer what help he could, told the reporter.
He said Charles’s wife was also touched. “She was absolutely deeply moved by just the love shown,” Porter said.1
A photo accompanying that article underscored both the sadness surrounding the Roberts family and the empathy of the Amish. Far off in the background is a green hill covered in trees surrounding a bright white barn. A little closer are cornstalks the color of sand, standing thick and dry in the field, ready to be harvested. Then, in the foreground, there is a cemetery, and little Elise Victoria Roberts’s heart-shaped, rose-colored tombstone with fresh flowers. Directly beside it, a fresh grave as of yet without any marking: Charles Roberts’s final resting place.
Nickel Mines graveyard with satellite dishes
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Contend Valiantly
IF ANY RELIGIOUS group has a right to bitterness and retaliation, it would have to be the Amish. Few people have endured as much injustice. A very brief glimpse into the remarkable history of the Amish culture sheds great light upon the forgiveness response of the Nickel Mines Amish community.
Their roots go back to Zurich in the 1500s, when a radical group of Christians following Luther’s teachings of salvation by grace through faith became more and more disillusioned with the Catholic church’s teachings. One of their main doctrinal disagreements revolved around infant baptism. The Zurich group didn’t believe that infants should be baptized, as they were not old enough to make informed decisions about following Christ.1
This was in direct conflict with the church’s teachings and practices, and the group began to be viewed as subversive, one that could undermine the fabric of society. On January 21, 1525, the dissenters baptized one another in direct opposition to the state-run church. For all these believers, it was their second baptism, since they had all been baptized as children. For this reason the group was quickly labeled “Anabaptist,” or literally, “second baptism.” For at least the next century the group would be fined, imprisoned, and exiled if they refused to follow the state-run religious guidelines. Eventually they would be tortured, and even executed, for not turning away from their religious belief that baptism was a choice to be made by adults.2
Meanwhile, in 1536 a man named Menno Simons joined the Anabaptist movement, encouraging peaceful living, in contrast to one Anabaptist movement that tried to impose its new beliefs on others by force. Menno was so influential in the movement, and worked so hard at reconciliation, that by 1545 the Anabaptist movement as a whole was often being referred to as “the Mennonites.” His peaceful approach to the doctrinal conflict with the state church influenced many toward nonresistance.3
In 1593, after numerous conventions and attempts at finding some common ground, a group of Anabaptists broke away from the main body over differences of opinion on how involved Anabaptists should be with the local, non-Anabaptist community, and how strictly the practice of shunning should be implemented. The main representative of this group was a man named Jakob Ammann. This group that joined him would eventually be referred to as “the Amish.”
Throughout all of these divisions and disagreements, one thing became all too clear: the state church would do everything in its power to stamp out this growing group of radicals. Early on the Anabaptists decided that their response to this very real persecution would be nonviolent, even passive, favoring the rewards of eternity instead of the temporary, worldly ways of self-defense and vengeance. Their decision came with a high price.
Members of the Anabaptist groups were rooted out, tortured, and put on trial. Hundreds would be killed in all manner of cruelty: burned at the stake, pulled limb from limb, hanged, and beheaded. But through those early days they continued on in their beliefs, refusing to turn from their doctrine or their peaceful way of life.
Finally the Anabaptists discovered tolerance under the Dutch government. By the mid-1600s they even found themselves involved in mainstream culture again, something that worried one particular Mennonite minister, Thieleman Jansz van Braght. He feared that their new, comfortable life would lead them to forget biblical teachings on humility and simplicity, and the sufferings experienced by their forefathers barely two generations removed.
To preserve the Anabaptist culture of nonconformity, van Braght searched through court records and other documents for stories of Anabaptist martyrs and compiled them in a nearly 1,500 page book titled Martyrs Mirror (sometimes called The Bloody Theater). This book is still found in some Amish homes today, and among the Amish it is often referenced. The stories in its pages may have supported the Anabaptists in their commitment to non-resistance more than any other book apart from the Bible.4
By choosing a life of nonresistance, it logically followed that the Anabaptists would have to learn to forgive because nonresistors chose not to respond to slights or injuries or violence done against them. By passing down these martyrs’ stories, they reminded each new generation that it is better to suffer and even die for the faith and to forgive their tormentors than to enter the cycle of violence that comes with trying to settle scores.
One of the most well-known stories from Martyrs Mirror is that of Dirk Willems. During the cold months of 1569, Willems, a “pious, faithful brother and follower of Jesus Christ,” found himself being hunted down by the local authorities for being an Anabaptist. If they caught him, they would give him two choices: renounce his faith in the second baptism or be put to death.
They discovered his whereabouts and sent a “thief catcher” after him. Knowing what would happen if he was caught, Willems ran for his life, eventually crossing a frozen river. The ice was thin and creaked under his weight. Cracks spread from where his feet hit the cold surface, but he made it across the river. Looking back, he saw the thief catcher break through the ice and flounder in the frigid current.
Though his escape was now virtually guaranteed, Dirk couldn’t let the man die. He ran back across the thin ice, stretched out toward the lunging arms of the thief catcher, and grabbed hold of his icy-cold hands. The two men struggled together against the river, the thief catcher desperate to be freed from the freezing water, Dirk pulling and hoping the ice would not break under him. Then they were both lying on the ice, their breath heaving, their bodies growing numb. But instead of rewarding his rescuer by letting him go, the thief catcher turned him into the authorities, who eventually tortured Willems and burned him at the stake.
Local court records corroborate the story:
Whereas, Dirk Willems, born at Asperen, at present a prisoner, has, without torture and iron bonds (or otherwise) before the bailiff and us judges, confessed, that at the age of fifteen, eighteen or twenty years, he was rebaptized in the Rotterdam, at the house of one Pieter Willems, an
d that he, further, in Asperen, at his house, at divers hours, harbored and admitted secret conventicles and prohibited doctrines, and that he also has permitted several persons to be rebaptized in his aforesaid house; all of which is contrary to our holy Christian faith, and to the decrees of his royal majesty, and ought not to be tolerated, but severely punished, for an example to others; therefore, we ... have condemned and do condemn by these presents in the name, and in the behalf, of his royal majesty, as Count of Holland, the aforesaid Dirk Willems, prisoner, persisting obstinately in his opinion, that he shall be executed with fire, until death ensues; and declare all his property confiscated, for the benefit of his royal majesty. So done this 16th of May, in presence of the judges ... 5
When an Amish father opens the pages of the Martyrs Mirror and reads aloud to his family about Dirk Willems, he is teaching them how to respond to those who treat them unfairly. And he is reminding them that even if a troubled man walks into a humble schoolhouse and kills one of his daughters, he can draw from the same rich reservoir of forgiveness that led Dirk Willems to show mercy to his own executioner.
During the same year that Dirk Willems was executed, a man named Willem Janss raced across the countryside toward Amsterdam. Only, in this case, no one was chasing him. Instead, Janss was hurrying so that he could attend the execution of a dear friend and perhaps strengthen him in his final hours.
