Tight-knit Amish shaken by attacks

Two small boys wearing matching blue shirts and black trousers held up with braces play on an old toy fire engine.

They race its battered frame up and down the side of the street, ringing the bell and shouting to each other, absorbed in their game.

A few feet away stand real fire officers helping guard the police cordon that seals off the short lane to the school, where gunman Charles Roberts killed five girls.

The two brothers, Wilmer and Mahlon Fisher, aged seven and eight, seem oblivious to the death and chaos wreaked on their tiny village, but their aunt, Anna Fisher, says they know something is wrong. They lost some of their friends in the attack.

"They have been told that they have died and have gone to heaven," she says.

She says her niece told her own daughters that "a bad man came in and did bad things".

History of persecution

The Amish have been here for generations.

As a people they have known collective trauma before. They arrived in Pennsylvania in the 18th Century, fleeing a Europe that persecuted them for their strict Protestant beliefs.

"What is God telling us?"
Unnamed local man

They found a safe haven here, and today the various different orders number some 50,000 in Lancaster County.

This is Amish country, where horse-drawn buggies carry the men to work in the rolling green pastures and cornfields.

Their wives, clothed in modest black dresses with white bonnets pushed back over their high foreheads, stay at home to look after the children, cook and sew.

Struggle for comprehension

It is a pre-industrial world they have preserved, but since Monday's attack they, and it, have been brutally catapulted into the 21st Century. A society they deem to be sinful and corrupting has violently shaken their own.

As the motives for Roberts' callous, carefully planned attack become clearer - suggesting a grief for his lost daughter that he'd never overcome - the people here turn to each other for comfort and they look to their bibles for answers.

Their faith requires non-violence and forgiveness but that surely is hard to do. One man wondered aloud: "What is God telling us?"

Meanwhile Anna Fisher says she can barely imagine the horrors the surviving children witnessed. She once worked as a teacher in an almost identical one-room schoolhouse and says the door was open to many a visitor.

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She has now left the Amish community to pursue what she describes as God's calling to be a nurse.

She specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder - a training she knows will be badly needed to help this tight-knit insular community begin to heal.