Vonnegut's Letter, w/ Poll of favorite works

I haven't seen this diaried here and I know it is late on a Saturday evening.

But this man meant the world to me:

Newsweek recently published his letter home after his return to the safety of Allied forces following the surrender of Germany in World War II.  The entire letter will soon be published in a compilation titled Armageddon in Retrospect.  I will thus only post here a few passages.

Vonnegut was captured by German forces during the Battle of the Buldge near the end of the war:

Well, the supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up, sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations—the floors were covered with cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood.

After serving as POW labor inside Germany, Vonnegut witnessed the firebombing of Dresden and its aftermath:

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.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

Vonnegut survived the war.  He lived on to become an important author and social critic.  

He passed away last year.

He is missed.