From the Desk of Jeff King

Spinning words

The word cloud above was created with an application called Wordle, using text found on my blog's front page. It's free and easy to use. You enter a bunch of words or a website URL, click a button and within seconds you have a piece of art. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts and color schemes. Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg. The cloud below is Isaiah 53, perhaps the most famous Messianic text in the Old Testament.

Private Galione

A foul odor drifted into the camp of the American 104th Infantry Division. Private John Galione, resting with his unit on the front lines in Germany, told his sergeant the smell gave him a "bad feeling." Informed that Russian soldiers had spotted a labor camp in the area, Galione concluded the odor was linked somehow to prisoners.

Galione wanted to respond but found little support. The sergeant refused him permission to scout the area, and only one soldier, a friend, would even discuss with him the merits of a rescue attempt. The 104th had fought bravely in Europe but many of its men, knowing the war would soon end, were tired of taking risks.

Galione was not one of them. About 9 p.m. on April 5, 1945, he slipped out of camp on foot and into the blackness of night. With a gut feeling to follow the trains, he found railroad tracks and began walking. His plan was to search for prisoners and return to camp before morning roll call. Galione nearly aborted the mission after several hours because of fatigue, hunger and a nagging leg wound. But a supernatural encounter kept him moving. Just as he was thinking of quitting and turning back he felt a nudge from behind. Assuming his buddy had decided to join him, Galione turned around but saw no one. Then the force grabbed his elbows and pushed him forward.

"My legs were tired but something was making me walk, telling me to keep following the trains," Galione is quoted in a book authored by daughter Mary Nahas. "Somehow it gave me the strength to keep going."

Five days later the tracks led Galione to the mouth of a tunnel carved in Germany's Harz Mountains. Hidden inside was the Nazi's top-secret V1 and V2 missile factory. Next to the tunnel stood a cluster of buildings surrounded by a fence and locked gate. It was the Mittelbau Dora Concentration Camp, which supplied slave labor to the underground Mittelwerk factory. Its discovery led to the liberation of prisoner camps across Europe and the seizing of Germany's prized rocket technology. Galione impacted world history although his participation was kept secret for more than 50 years.

The V2 was the world's first ballistic missile and the V1 a cruise missile launched from ground ramps and airborne bombers. Seattle's Museum of Flight recently added a restored V1 to its grand hall, which houses historic aircraft. Visitors are informed that parts of this missile were salvaged from the Mittelwerk factory. More than 20,000 Dora laborers died in harsh, degrading conditions. Jewish and non-Jewish workers who were caught sabotaging missiles during production were hanged. The V1 and V2 are the only weapons in history to have killed more people during assembly than in warfare.

Galione's name is missing from the Seattle exhibit as well as American history books. Few people outside his family are aware of his discovery, which transferred post-war power to the United States. Galione beat the Russian army to the weapons cache by mere hours.

As he approached the tunnel in 1945 Galione had no clue what he was about to uncover. He inspected a train car filled with corpses, which he learned later was bound for the nearby Buchenwald crematorium. Galione dropped an ammo clip by accident, alerting a German guard. Gunfire was exchanged briefly before the guard ran off. Bullets had whizzed past Galione as he scrambled for cover above the tunnel entrance. He marveled that he was not wounded or killed.

It was not the first time Galione had survived a brush with death. As a boy, he miraculously escaped after falling through the ice while skating on the frozen Delaware River. The murky, swift current swept him under the ice and toward certain death. Moments before drowning, Galione found himself lying on top of the ice. He can't explain how he got there. The only footprints in the snow were his own. During the war, he was one of only three men in his group to survive swimming across Holland's Mark River under enemy fire. The weight of Galione's backpack nearly drowned him. "I don't know how I made it across. I never learned how to swim," he said. "We had a strong feeling there was a divine reason we had been spared."

The reason became more clear as Galione turned his attention to the emaciated laborers at Dora, who were staring at him from behind the front gate. Galione was unable to break the lock with his rifle but returned later with American GIs he'd recruited from another unit. Before dawn on April 11 Galione and two men busted through the gate and drove their Jeep slowly into the compound. In the shadows they could make out twisted, discolored corpses on the ground.

A gaunt prisoner approached the Americans, pointed to the infirmary and said weakly "there are people in there." The driver pulled the Jeep close to the door, stepped inside and witnessed another horror scene: about a hundred living skeletons lying motionless in beds, barely breathing. "We were so frightened we put the Jeep in reverse and drove out backward real fast," Galione said. "We didn't know what was going on in there and we didn't want to end up like the people we saw. The German guards had abandoned the prisoners, but we didn't know that. To be safe we wanted to bring more men."

Galione, who had walked more than a hundred miles to find the camp, took a three-hour Jeep ride back to his own unit. He told his sergeant he had located the labor camp and described the gruesome scene. At first the sergeant was reluctant to respond because of the threat of a German ambush, but relented and ordered Galione to radio other troops for assistance. "I was so happy," said Galione, who led an infantry division to liberate Dora the next day. "The people were in such bad shape. I don't think they had another day left to live."

The Third Armored Division sped toward Dora to provide infantry cover but got lost and located another camp, Nordhausen, by accident. It held more than 400 dying prisoners. When Galione's detachment entered Dora, many battle-hardened soldiers, encountering Holocaust victims for the first time, wept and vomited. Galione said the laborers "looked like the walking dead. They were skin and bones. The people were so happy to see us. They were tugging our clothes, feeling our uniforms between their fingers like they were gold." Some were so weak they died before reaching the front gate.

The Pentagon ordered the immediate search for other prisoner camps, motivated largely by the discovery of Nazi weapons. At Mittelwerk the Americans seized V2 missiles, secret documents and more than 120 scientists, including Wernher von Braun, considered the greatest rocket engineer of the 20th century. The equipment and men were moved to the United States, where testing led to the development of high-tech weaponry and the manned space program. Von Braun, a key figure in the Apollo moon program, was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ford in 1977 and considered an American hero. Dora survivors were outraged. They saw the fruit of Von Braun's early rocket development: the torture and murder of thousands of slave laborers. "Everything that is now in space had its origins here (Camp Dora), not in America or Russia," said French Dora survivor Rene Steenbeke, who is quoted in Nahas' book The Journey of Private Galione. "This is where a new science started, but it is also where science and death met."

Galione never pinpointed the source of the odor. Camp Dora was ruled out because it was more than a hundred miles from Lippstadt, where the 104th had paused to rest. Galione said he encountered the odor on other occasions near train cars.

Nahas says her father in the 1970s surrendered to God the burdens he had carried following the war and came to some important conclusions. He believed that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had sovereignly led him to the Nazi factory and concentration camp. Although an officer forced Galione to take a vow of silence regarding his discovery (Nahas claims the Army wanted to promote and decorate other men), family members say the Lord honored him in a miraculous way: seven children and grandchildren were born on the liberation dates of concentration camps (Nordhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau) that had sent prisoners to Dora. One of his daughters was born without vital signs but revived by a doctor. It was April 15, the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald and Nordhausen.

Galione, who died in 1999, believed God had spent a lifetime establishing a Holocaust memorial through the liberation-date births of his offspring. Galione wanted Jewish survivors to know that the Lord loved them and had divinely orchestrated their rescue. Nahas calls the Third Armor's miscue – missing Dora and stumbling upon Nordhausen by accident – a miracle. "That's where they (Nazis) had dumped the people that were too weak to make missiles, leaving them to languish and die," she said in a radio interview. "God was trying to save the weakest first."

Nahas broke the silence about her father's participation by publishing an Internet article in 2000 and book in 2004. Her writing fulfilled a word of prophecy spoken over her by a Christian missionary from British Guiana when she was 15. The man spotted Nahas sitting in the back pew during a church service and called her forward. Without prior knowledge or contact with her family, the missionary said her father was the liberator of German concentration camps but hadn't told anyone. But one day she would chronicle her father's story and it would touch nations.

Nahas' book includes a photo copy of an affidavit signed by her father's sergeant, Leonard Puryear, crediting Galione with the discovery of Camp Dora. Survivors have collaborated her father's testimony. Nahas used some of their comments to capture the struggle for survival inside the camp, including this prayer expressed by Yves Beon while he was incarcerated:

Here, believers and atheists meet in the same communion, begging God, even the devil, and all the genius that may come to the hearts of men to inject into the Americans the madness that will make them plunge forward enough for us. Don't lose any time, guys, we're here and crying out for help, and you should hear us well. You, Harry, even if you have an ache in your side, charge on in spite of it! And you, Joe, even if your tank runs out of gas, push it with every ounce of strength! Even if you're tired, keep on as if nothing had happened, without stopping, so long as you arrive here! You'll have all the time you want to sleep afterward!

John Galione heard their cries well.

The good Shepherd

There is no Savior besides Me (Hosea 13:4)

The minor prophet Zephaniah describes the Hebrew language as "pure." The Hebrew rendering for pure, barar, means to clarify, brighten and purify. The ancient Hebrew pictograph language, the one used by Moses to pen the Torah, does exactly that. It draws a picture to clarify what God is communicating to mankind, expressions sometimes missed in English Bible translations. Consider the word "savior" in the Hosea verse above. In our Greco-Roman, western mindset, the word is an abstract thought: redeem, defend, preserve. Pictograms represent an action, giving words a deeper and richer understanding. Here's how the the Hebrew word for "savior," yasha, looks in pictographic script (Hebrew is read from right to left):

Combined, the letters SHIN (teeth) and AYIN (eye) can be interpreted "the destroyer watches." According to Jeff Benner's Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible, a shepherd watches over the flock and the surrounding area, always on the lookout for danger. When a predator attacks, the shepherd destroys the enemy. The first letter, YAD, means arm or hand. Collectively, the pictograms describe the role of our good Shepherd, Yeshua the Messiah: "With a strong arm the Destroyer watches." Yeshua guards His flock, whom He loves, day and night. The LORD declares in John 10:28, "I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand."