# Daniel Gerber and Ruth Wilting

Vietnam service and loss, 1962–1968 · Overview

Daniel Gerber went to Vietnam through alternative service with Mennonite Central Committee. He worked at a leprosarium, a hospital serving people with leprosy, at Ban Me Thuot, operated by the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Ruth Wilting, his fiancée, also worked at the hospital. Their shared setting was a work of care in the midst of an increasingly destructive conflict.

In May 1962, Gerber was captured with two other workers and taken away. The photographed panel gives May 31, while a contemporary obituary preserved by the Mennonite Library and Archives gives May 30. Both accounts remember his disappearance and the long absence of confirmed news. The panel’s heading, “1940–?”, leaves his death date unresolved; this history does not replace that uncertainty with an invented date.

Wilting returned home for a time and then went back to the hospital in Vietnam. She was killed in an attack in 1968. The two lives intersect in this account through Christian medical service and the cost borne by those who continued it. Gerber’s MCC role is explicitly Mennonite; the sources place Wilting in the Christian and Missionary Alliance hospital work and do not establish that she herself belonged to a Mennonite church.



- [Supplied timeline photograph IMG_9367, caption F](https://github.com/trueChristian/history.truechristian.church/blob/main/sources/church-history/photos/IMG_9367.jpg)
- [Mennonite Library and Archives: contemporary Ruth Wilting obituary (1968)](https://mla.bethelks.edu/mediawiki/index.php?title=Wilting%2C_Ruth_M._%281926-1968%29)

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Page: https://history.truechristian.church/en/people/daniel-gerber-and-ruth-wilting/

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