"Please don’t leave me here!" 9-year-old Jack shrieked as his mother boarded the ship back to America.

Neither Jack nor his mother imagined the transition from Chicago’s slums to the German countryside could be anything less than idyllic. Nor did the little family dream a massive world war would stretch their short year of separation into almost a decade of horror.

Forced into a Nazi labor camp at age 14, young Jack Blanco suffered skirmishes with death and years of near starvation that ultimately launched him into what would become a lifetime of one tumultuous experience after another.

Only God could develop this disillusioned, religion-hating man into a respected theologian and author of the best-selling Bible paraphrase The Clear Word.