“My father did what he had to do to protect us. I don’t blame him for running or for living under a false name. I blame the man who made him so afraid he felt he had no choice. I’m grateful my father kept us alive. That’s what matters.”
Sarah, forty-five, is a teacher at a Mennonite school in Kentucky. She’s more open about the family’s history, having written about the experience in a limited-circulation memoir published by a Mennonite press.
“We were children living in fear,” she writes. “We didn’t understand why we had to hide, why we had to leave, why we couldn’t go home. For years, I was angry at my parents for that. But as an adult, as a mother myself, I understand. They made impossible choices in an impossible situation. They saved our lives.”
David, forty-one, works as a blacksmith in Pennsylvania, having left the Amish community in his twenties to join a more progressive Mennonite church. He’s been the most vocal about the injustice of what happened.
