Stumbling into the Past

Part 2

Pullman and Cederle in Print

Much later that night, after the kids were in bed, I sat down to resume my reading of the Hutterite chapter in The Story of the Mennonites. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Hutterites' history of constant persecution and relocating, they keep a meticulous journal of their doings for almost 300 years. This Book of Chronicles tells all, from gruesome persecutions to fires, floods and droughts, deaths of church leaders, changes in rules and regulations that governed their religious practices, even details of church quarrels. This chapter on the Hutterites contained excerpts from the Chronicle, listed chronologically by year. As I read on, the name of Grandma's hometown in Slovakia, Sobotište, began to appear in the entries as a town with a thriving Hutterite settlement. Neat, I thought. Now the history is getting personal...

Sobotiste, painted by a relative of Grandma, 1938

*1663: On the third day of September, the Turks and Tators arrived at Dechtiz a short time before dinner They took captive thirty-five souls, and two of the brethren were cut down and murdered. The buildings were burned down, and all the crops in the fields destroyed. The next day the community at Sobotiste was destroyed.

Ouch, I thought. Further entries, however, imply the rebuilding of the Sobotište community, so all appears to be well again. Other sample Chronicle entries go on to report the return of a kidnapped Hutterite woman, a heat wave, an epidemic, and a famine. When I came to an entry for the year 1733, I started getting the chills:

1733: In this year came the terrifying mandate that we should not baptize our newborn babes, but that we must take them to the priests for baptism or suffer a heavy penalty. The elders and the superintendent together with the brethren met at Sobotiste to consult regarding this unheard of order, and decided not without many tears and twangs of conscience, to obey this order, since there was no other way out of this tyranny. This decision caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in the church, and resulted in a division.

Grandma's hometown, a town where its Hutterite community had experienced a relative degree of peace and stability, was about to be turned upside down with a new form of persecution.

1761: On March 21, Jesuit missionaries, accompanied by four guards, appeared at Sobotiste, arrested three of the leaders, Walter, Pulmon, and Cseterle, and took them away. The meeting house was closed, the key turned over to the Jesuit representative, and the brethren were warned that they must attend his preaching and send their children to his catechetical class. They were ordered to give up all their books, to dismiss their teachers, and send their children to the Catholic schools. The Habener were forbidden to carry on their services. Many of the brethren vigorously protested against these measures and cried out that they would rather lay their necks on the block and lose their lives than obey the Catholic priest and send their children to his school.

There it was – Haban(er). My heart skipped a beat, not so much because I saw the word “Haban” in print, but because of the two names in the beginning of the 1761 entry, the last names of the leaders – Pulmon (Pullman), Grandma's maiden name, and Cseterle (Cederle), Grandpa's name.** (I later read the journal entry to my mother who recognized the third name, Walter, as a family still living in Sobotište when she visited the area in 1938.)

A Pullman and a Cederle that weren't Catholic...people with our family names in direct opposition to church authorities. It would take some time, good Catholic girl that I was, to wrap my head around what I had just read. The thought I had leaving the library earlier that day, the one that turned me around and compelled me to check out the book was right – there was so much more I needed to read...

* Journal entries found in The Story of the Mennonites by C. Henry Smith

**Though Grandpa's family was not from Sobotište, he had a good friend with that name from the town, and Grandma had Cederle cousins in her hometown.

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. - Shirley Abbott