I am from a rural Aiken County, South Carolina community called “Hollow Creek”. It is about 30 miles from each of the three closest incorporated municipalities:
Columbia
Aiken
Orangeburg
Closer still is a town called ‘New Holland’ and there is what I perceive from the names and religious persuasions to be a Pennsylvania Dutch derivation … a Mennonite church lay on the outskirts and a number of the inhabitants resemble dutch people I’ve encountered on the West coast and elsewhere during my travels.
Still, the Mennonites are there living quietly and not known for the collusion, subterfuge, stolen wills, and dirty dealings characteristic of having one too many insipid inbred corrupt individuals in their midst. Lucky them.
Somebody get me my deer rifle …

I once read about an Anabaptist Mennonite martyr named Dirk Willems. His story is particularly sad due to the nature of his passing and that streak of treachery which has followed us all from then until now.
Willems was a native of Asperen, Gelderland in the Netherlands. He was baptized as a young man, thereby rejecting the infant baptism practiced at that time by both Catholics and established Protestants in the Netherlands.
These developments and the fact that he was converting others to his “non Roman Catholic” faith caused him to be first condemned by the Catholic Church in the Netherlands and then arrested.

He escaped from his prison which was in a residential palace escaping by rope he made of knotted rag. Crossing the frozen moat he was pursued by a guard who fell through the ice and would have surely died had Willems not returned and rescued him.
The rescued guard was grateful and wanted to let him escape. However, the local mayor ordered him to pursue the alleged heretic Dirk Willems and he was held until he suffered burning at the stake near his hometown on this day in 1569.
He gave his life to save another though that other was persecuting him for his faith. I should be so noble.
Today he is revered by the anabaptists — that group of religious individuals which include the Amish and Mennonites and he is a folk hero in his home town of Asperen as well.