SOME came in sorrow, some in solidarity. Many carried a niggling sense of shame. It was not that the people of Oak Creek bore responsibility for the tragedy of a white supremacist shooting dead six worshippers in a Sikh temple on Aug 5. But some residents turning out at the candlelit vigil on Aug 7 for the victims recognised that they knew too little about the Sikhs living, and dying, in their midst.

“We didn’t know about them,” said Loren Bauer, a retired machinist. “We see them but we don’t pay much attention. The only thing I ever heard about them was that a lot of people thought they were Muslims after 9/11.”

Teri Pelzek, too, had barely heard of Sikhs. “I knew nothing about them at all. I don’t think a lot of people did. When we don’t know about somebody’s religion we assume the worst,” she said.

Yet the rapid learning curve since the massacre delivered up the unexpected. Some at the vigil were struck by the Sikh community’s willingness to forgive the man who committed murder in their temple, who was himself shot dead by the police, and to emphasise peace over vengeance. The town’s police chief, John Edwards, was among them.

“In 28 years of law enforcement, I have seen a lot of hate. I have seen a lot of revenge. I’ve seen a lot of anger. What I saw, particularly from the Sikh community this week, was compassion, concern, support,” he told the vigil. “What I didn’t see was hate. I did not see revenge. I didn’t see any of that. And in law enforcement that’s unusual to not see that reaction to something like this. I want you all to understand how unique that is.”

Pelzek said that in a country so often unforgiving and vengeful it was startling to see the Sikh response to the tragedy.

The lesson, spelled out by Oak Creek’s mayor, Steve Saffidi, was that it shouldn’t have taken a tragedy for Sikhs, or anyone else, to find acceptance.

“Our healing process begins tonight when we come together, joining hands, sharing customs, meeting each other, some for the first time — many people that we have probably not met before. That is a good thing for our community,” he said.

The theme resonated through the evening. Wisconsin’s Governor, Scott Walker, said the legacy of the killings should be for people to pay a little bit more attention to their fellow citizens, their neighbours and their friends. The vigil was arranged to follow National Night Out where people in towns across the US gather one evening a year to combat crime and promote community spirit. In Oak Creek they cancelled the closing fireworks out of respect for the dead but not the cheerleaders so that groups of Sikhs made their way to the neighbouring park for the vigil to the sound of young women yelping as they waved their pom poms to dance music.

In time, hundreds of people drifted across to don symbolic white turbans and hold candles.

The murdered victims were honoured individually with short accounts of how each came to be in the US and their lives in Oak Creek. Four of them were Indian citizens.

Satwant Kaleka, 65, is the victim most often talked about in the wider community because, the vigil was told, he “died defending the temple he built attempting to fend off a gunman who attacked worshippers on Sunday”. —The Guardian, London