While reading the tragic, blood-curdling accounts of Canada’s Residential Schools, I was struck once again by how torturous it must have been for parents during that period -- where a dreadful decision by powerful government and church leaders forcibly separated children from families, effectively destroying a people’s future, in the name of assimilating them into an enemy culture.

My mind wandered to Europe and some dismal chapters of my own Hutterite history involving a similar decision, but with a drastically different outcome. What i....