Saved by Prayers

Henry Langrehr was born in Clinton, Iowa on November 4, 1924. He was raised during the Great Depression and wasn't old enough to serve when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Before his 18th birthday, he quit high school to defend his country and asked Arlene Ketelsen to marry him. They decided to wait until he came back from the war. Being a paratrooper paid $50 per month more, and as part of the 82nd Airborne Division, Henry was one of 16,000 men who parachuted into France early in the morning of June 6, 1944. He weighed 150 pounds and had that much weight in material strapped to his back. The men sat on benches facing one another waiting for their time to jump. As they got closer to France, a gun shell landed on the wing instantly killed the man across from Henry and the person sitting beside him. They jumped, but they were five miles off course, landing in Sainte-M re- glise, a German-controlled village in France. Many men landed in the trees and were shot by the Germans. His friend was caught on a church steeple and Henry crashed landed through the glass of a greenhouse. During the battle, two good friends were shot and died in Henry's arms. Both recited Bible verses before they died. Henry remembers the look of peace on their faces and wished he had that peace, too. Death was all around him fighting through the hedgerows of Normandy. These were mounds of earth designed to keep cattle in and to mark land boundaries. They were various heights and sometimes met overhead like a tunnel. Men were separated from their units, and it was frightening being there alone. One day Henry shot a panzerfaust, a German version of the American bazooka gun, and the powerful blast knocked him out. He awoke a prisoner of war (POW). Henry and about a hundred others (Americans, British, Polish and Russians) were loaded onto boxcars, packed very tightly with no food or water. Due to an Allied bombing, the train stopped just outside the gate of Auschwitz concentration camp. They set up a temporary camp with no bathrooms and deplorable conditions. The prisoners watched the Jewish people in the camp. Henry saw naked, dead bodies with shaved heads brought out of a gas chamber on carts and stacked four or five feet high. When asked in 2016 what he would say to someone who denies the Holocaust, Henry said, "They aren't living in the real world. I saw it." Later, the POWs were taken by boxcar to a coal mine in Czechoslovakia where Henry worked as a slave for over eight months. The Nazi Commander often reminded them: "Nobody escapes from this camp." Some tried and were killed. Henry tried to reason with the SS Guard that the conditions did not live up the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. He hit Henry with the butt of the rifle. The prisoners were fed beet soup and bread made of sawdust. Miraculously, Henry and his friend successfully escaped. He weighed a mere ninety-nine pounds and was full of lice when the Americans found him. Henry returned to Iowa into the arms of Arlene who had prayed for him daily. Henry remembered men dying all around him during the war and often wondered, "Why not me?" His fianc asked him to pray asking Christ into his life. Henry has lived with faith every day since then. He married his sweetheart on July 1, 1945. She was working in a factory making machine gun parts like many other women working men's jobs during the war. These women are called "Rosie the Riveter". Henry's experiences on D-day are seen in the first movie made about Normandy. The Longest Day, starred John Wayne. The film portrays a young man crashing into the glass roof of a greenhouse. That man, in real life, was Henry Langrehr. Henry worked in contracting so he and his wife built their own home. They raised four children there in Clinton, Iowa. Today, Henry says, "The Lord has his hand in my life. He guided me through and saw me home. He had a purpose for me, and that purpose was my family."