by Velma Rice
A family member from the generation of my great great grandmother tells a story about bells. The family had immigrated before the U.S. Civil War to Texas from Zadverice in Moravia, a province of Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia. During 1870 they returned to their European home where a daughter was confirmed in the [Czech] Moravian Brethren Church of Zadverice. The family realized that they had become accustomed to the freedom and liberty of the new world and that they had to return to Texas which they did. Later, during WW I there was a governmental edict to confiscate the bells from the belfry of the Zadverice church and “make them into weapons of war. This order, however, was frustrated by several members of the church, who at night, under the cover of darkness, and under penalty of death removed these bells from the belfry where they had been for probably a century, before, buried them in the ground in the field, where they remained buried until after the collapse of the Austrian government and the birth of the Czechoslovak Republic, when they were unearthed, returned and placed back in the belfry of the church.” When the news reached the young woman who had been confirmed, who now had her own children, she wept for joy “that the bells of the church, in which she was confirmed were not despoiled in such a manner and did not fall into the hands of the enemy for such nefarious and ignoble purposes.” Her son returned years later to touch those very bells.