Vonnegut’s Days at Slaughterhouse 5

Letters of Note has reproduced Kurt Vonnegut’s typewritten letter to the folks back home giving his personal account of several months spent as a POW, when he was shot at by Germans, Americans, British, and Russian aircraft, starved, beaten, marched on foot without food sixty miles, and assigned to forced labor at the underground Dresden slaughterhouse known in German as Schlachthof Fünf. It was an awful job, but nevertheless led to his surviving one of the deadliest attacks of the war. He laconically explained:

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.

 [Thanks to David Klaus for the link.]