WHAT KURT VONNEGUT SAW IN WORLD WAR II THAT MADE HIM CRAZY (ALONG WITH BILLY PILGRIM, RABO KARABEKIAN, ELIOT ROSEWATER, ET AL.)

Toward the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s literary and historical time-travel narrative of World War II, Slaughterhouse-Five, a boxcar-load of American prisoners of war arrives in Dresden, Germany. It is quite late in the war, the spring of 1945, yet somehow a whole priceless metropolitan treasure house of art and culture has been preserved from both Nazi militarizations and Allied mass destructions. At the door of the boxcar stands Vonnegut’s fictional protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, the once and future optometrist of Ilium, New York, for the moment dressed in a prison camp vaudeville costume of blue robe, fur ruff, and silver boots that makes him look rather like Cinderella. Here is what he sees: “It looked like a Sunday School picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.” Somebody standing behind him in the boxcar, a fellow POW in the shipment, has his own, characteristically American take on the fantasy scene. “Oz,” he says. The fellow POW in question is Kurt Vonnegut. Or so he tells us. “That was I,” he avers. “That was me.” And he has spoken so for his own good reason, he suggests. “The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.”

What anybody sees, actually, if they are part of the POW cohort in question or the citizens who come out to greet them, will not be Dresden for long. Billy knows that. As he walks amid the festive architecture—presumably in the company of young Kurt Vonnegut, the architect’s son from Indianapolis—of the place called “The Florence of the Elbe,” “Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to smithereens and then burned—in about thirty more days. He knew, too, that most of the people watching him would soon be dead. So it goes.” Again, the voice in the last sentence is really—if such a word may be used—that of the character named Kurt Vonnegut. It is the death card he plants throughout the book—somewhere between the French “ça va” and the German “und so weiter”—a phrase he has warned us to expect anytime someone or something is about to die. (He tells us also that he got the idea from Celine.)

During the thirty days in between, the Americans do not see much of Dresden proper. Their little piece of Dresden is called Schlachthof-Fünf—Slaughterhouse-Five—part of a great centralized abattoir of the city where animals are killed and processed for human consumption. Theirs is building number five in the compound. Number five, it turns out, is for pigs, although the fact no longer seems of any particular consequence. Germans like pig meat, to be sure; Jews abhor it; Americans think it makes great hot dogs. No one in Dresden in early spring 1945 is eating happily or well—except, in the case of certain lucky POWs, furtively and intermittently, of a strange, exotic substance they are employed, as slave laborers, to help manufacture: a malt syrup being specially produced by the Reich, in the beneficent spirit of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, for expectant mothers. This is actually their work in the days leading up to the firestorm. Always hungry on their prisoner rations, the GIs sneak sweet, golden ladlesful into their mouths when no one is looking. Like glowing angels in heaven, they become secret spooners, partaking of the ­ambrosial.

To compound all such ironies further, of course, is what happens to the enemy-soldier POW denizens of Slaughterhouse-Five during the great Allied firebombing raid that shortly smashes and incinerates the city, along with an estimated one hundred thousand of its noncombatant German citizens. What happens to the enemy aliens is that nothing happens to them. They spend the night safely entombed inside the whited sepulcher that is their place of imprisonment while on the outside Armageddon rages. In the morning, after the great visitation of fire and sword has passed, they emerge to find the world gone.

It is to having been present for all of this, technically, that Vonnegut claims, amid the long authorial-identification subtitle that fills most of the title page of his greatest and most famous book. “The Children’s Crusade,” and, “A Duty Dance of Death,” he calls it, “by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A FOURTH-GENERATION GERMAN-AMERICAN NOW LIVING IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES ON CAPE COD [AND SMOKING TOO MUCH] WHO, AS AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SCOUT, HORS DE COMBAT, AS A PRISONER OF WAR, WITNESSED THE FIRE-BOMBING OF DRESDEN, GERMANY, ‘THE FLORENCE OF THE ELBE,’ A LONG TIME AGO, AND SURVIVED TO TELL THE TALE.” The basic claim, that is to say, is that of witness in the sense of bearing witness—to say what he has seen. In the more literal sense, the phrasing he uses in a memoir, Man without a Country, probably gets it more accurately. “I saw the destruction of Dresden,” he writes. “I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward . . . .” In Palm Sunday, he is more specific. “When we came up, the city was gone.” As Billy puts it to Montana Wildhack, his Tralfamadorian lover-muse, “It was like the moon.”

What he did not see from the inside of Slaughterhouse-Five was a full day and night of high-explosive demolition of streets, buildings, monuments, houses, and living human organisms, followed by the towering cyclone of flame, the all-consuming, all-destroying pillar of oxidation; nor did he feel the giant vacuum that tore people’s breath out of their lungs, that sucked their very bodies into the vortex. (He says in another place that the German guards ran up the stairs every so often while the bombing was going on to take a look outside. Is any of this what they saw?) Such death and destruction proper, presumably, the troglodytes of Slaughterhouse-Five had to imagine. Or learn about from other sources: within the text, for instance, from a pompous Harvard professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, the officially designated author of a one-volume history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War II—the big picture, so to speak—with whom Billy is briefly forced to share a room after a 1968 plane crash; or without, almost incredibly—even in a text where cosmic ironies compound cosmic ironies—from a work by David Irving, later a notorious Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier who, as a young English scholar-archivist, was among the first historians to devote a book bringing the little-known story of the monstrous, and from a military standpoint, utterly gratuitous raid to the attention of English and American readers.

What Vonnegut did see when it was safe to come out was surely quite enough to make him wish he had stayed inside—perhaps forever. Most famously fictionalized in Slaughterhouse-Five, and then corroborated in other texts—essay, lecture, memoir—this was the part he lived through in the days of aftermath, the part he would carry with him for the rest of his life. This was the part about corpses on the ground, with sublimated skeletons, reduced to little, brown, charred bundles—a vision grimly authenticated by photo illustrations in W.G. Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction, a controversial account of the bombings written from the German side; or, in the alternative, of entire families in basements and groups in shelters killed with bodies completely intact, victims of instant concussion or suffocation. The point is bodies—bodies everywhere. And, if one’s own experience of war is to serve as a measuring stick, bodies in very bad shape, disrepair, nasty disassembly. Human bodies by the hundreds and thousands, needing to be dragged out of shelters, basements, collapsed public spaces, from the rubble of destroyed buildings. We see something of that at the very end of Slaughterhouse-Five, where Billy is assigned, in a kind of Ishmael-Queequeg relation, with another POW, a tattooed Maori from New Zealand, captured at Tobruk, to begin excavating the post-bombing moonscape. The excavation is in search of human remains. Soon they hit paydirt, of a sort. They have unearthed an entire chamber full of entombed, unmarked, dead human bodies. “Thus began the first corpse mine in Dresden,” says the narrator. There turn out to be hundreds of them. But soon the real horror begins. “They didn’t smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”—in the latter case, not unlike that of the narrator’s breath, he tells us, when he gets drunk as an older man and compulsively phones people at night. The stink and work prove too much for the Maori, who dies of the dry heaves, vomiting up his own stomach tissue, a kind of self-dismemberment. “He tore himself to pieces,” says the narrator, “throwing up and throwing up.” The Germans find a new and improved technique to deal with the awful work. “Bodies weren’t brought up any more. They were cremated by soldiers with flamethrowers where they were. The soldiers stood outside the shelters, simply sent the fire in.” “This way to the ovens, ladies and gentlemen,” one might say. Vonnegut settles for “so it goes.”

The Slaughterhouse-Five account tallies in many respects with a parallel description Vonnegut himself gave some years after publication of the novel in the Palm Sunday interview previously cited. For both its detail and the angry precision of its cold, grim, matter-of-fact impassioned first-person memory, it is worth quoting at length:

Thus the details of the death duty, or, perhaps more properly, the “duty-dance with death” listed among the myriad descriptive subtitles of Slaughterhouse-Five. Later Vonnegut would disclaim actually seeing the flamethrower incinerations. Perhaps they offer too conveniently parallel a literary figure to the industrial-style efficiency of methods being elsewhere employed at the same moment for the plunder, asphyxiation, and incineration of Jews. In contrast, if the author seems rather finicky on that point of truth-telling, the emphasis in the passage cited on intact bodies strikes one as eerily obsessive. On the other hand, maybe there wasn’t much body substance left lying around for those who had taken the brunt of the high explosive followed by the incendiaries. Those little brown bundles may have been all that was left. As to the bodies Vonnegut and his fellow POWs did have to handle, what still comes to mind are analogous photographic images from the liberated death camps, with SS guards being forced to untangle and stack the twisted, mucky, disintegrating corpses of their victims. In Dresden, there must have been bodies everywhere; and even those dead of suffocation, or rupture of cranial tissues and blood vessels due to shock and concussion, would have started looking and smelling dead—as any soldier will testify—almost immediately. Within mere hours the first elements of decomposition, particles and liquids of dissolving mucous membranes, for instance, would have begun to mix with the residuals of emptied bladders and voided bowels. Within a day or so, the phrase “vast charnel house” would surely have come to mind. Vonnegut speculates on what German survivors must have thought as they watched him doing “such gruesome work” at gunpoint—and whether they felt a certain justice at seeing Allied POWs being so employed. “But who knows what they thought?” he goes on. “Their minds may have been blank. I know mine was.”

We know some further things from Vonnegut himself about the extended aftermath. We know, for instance, that by May 1945, his captors had marched his group of POW survivors out of Dresden in advance of the onrushing Soviet armies, only to abandon them in a strange wilderness, “a wholly ungoverned area,” Vonnegut calls it, “somewhere in rural Southeastern Germany, near the border with Czechoslovakia.” The account, in Fates Worse Than Death, is accompanied by a number of photographs in which a motley-uniformed group of ex-Dresden POWs, having availed themselves of “an abandoned Wehrmacht horse and wagon,” resemble what might be charitably described as some kind of traveling circus. On the back of a big, long, coffin-shaped wagon, someone has painted USA. (In a heartbreaking moment in Slaughterhouse-Five, a fictionalized version of the gypsy band is scolded by an old German couple for their neglectful mistreatment of borrowed horses, their mouths torn, their hooves cracked and bleeding. The reproach sets Billy to soundless weeping. We suddenly understand the point of the epigraph to the book, a stanza from the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger.” “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,” the lines read; “The little lord Jesus no crying he makes.”) The POWs are wanderers, true strangers in a strange land, having just journeyed out of an unearthly valley, Vonnegut tells us, teeming with other “liberated prisoners of war like ourselves,” “convicts, lunatics, concentration camp victims, and slave laborers,” in turn mixed with “armed German soldiers,” all waiting for the war to end. In a group photograph, we see the actual Bernard V. O’Hare. The actual Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is there, too, lying in the wagon with his head resting against the back, stretched out full length, too tired and hungry to move. We see his face in relief, in silhouette, like a death mask.

The strange valley itself becomes a central subject of Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, as the place where that novel’s narrator and title character, actually an artist named Rabo Karabekian, captured as an American officer in the Battle of the Bulge, has also found himself after being marched into the countryside and abandoned by prison camp guards. The commander of a combat camouflage unit—assembled, with the kind of cartoon illogic of which only the army is capable, of painters—is another damaged veteran, in this case with one eye, the other having been shot out during his capture. He has never forgotten what he saw there. “There may have been as many as ten thousand people below us,” he recalls—concentration camp survivors, slave laborers, lunatics released from jails and prisons, captured officers and enlisted men from every Army which had fought the Germans.” He goes on: “What a sight! And, if that weren’t enough for a person to see and then marvel about for a lifetime, listen to this: the very last remains of Hitler’s armies, their uniforms in tatters but their killing machines still in working order, were also there. Unforgettable!” He has since gone on to become a pioneer champion and collector of American abstract expressionists of his cohort. Though not a distinguished painter in his own right, he turns out to be an obsessive one, and the subject of his great painterly obsession has very much to do with what he has seen. His pièce de résistance, in fact, turns out to be a great mural of the valley he passed through as a POW in the last days of World War II. He described the place earlier to an old lover who suggested he call it “The Peaceable Kingdom.” On canvas, as a realized visual phantasmagoria, it is more Hieronymus Bosch than Edward Hicks, with “an average,” he observes, of “ten clearly drawn World War Two survivors to each square foot of the painting.” (At first, he says, he tried to make up a story and then paint the person to whom it belonged. At some point, exhausted, he gave over the project, telling interested viewers, “Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit.” He painted himself in, with a man clinging to his leg and looking up at him as if he were God. The man is dying of pneumonia and has two hours to live. He is a Canadian bombardier who was shot down over an oil field in Hungary. There is an SS concentration camp guard who has thrown away his uniform, fearful of being recognized by a nearby crowd of his dying victims. His identity will be detected by anyone who notices the serial number tattooed on his upper left arm. There are Yugoslav partisans, a sergeant major in the Moroccan Spahis, a Scottish glider pilot, a Gurkha, a turncoat Ukrainian machine-gun squad in German uniforms. Another old lover (platonic, he claims) observes that the painting is short on women. Not so, says Karabekian. At least half the concentration camp inmates and half the escapees from the lunatic asylums are women, albeit not looking their most thriving. But there are not any healthy women, she protests. “Wrong again,” says Karabekian. “You’ll find healthy ones at either end—in the corners at the bottom.” They are German women, hiding down in the vegetable cellars. They know that the Russians are coming, and that with the Russians will come the rapes. Does the overall painting have a title, she asks? Yes, says Karabekian. As a panorama of the last days of World War II, it is entitled “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.”

For my own part, as a veteran of the Vietnam War battlefield, I’d like to know, beyond Billy Pilgrim or Rabo Karabekian, what Kurt Vonnegut saw, particularly in close combat, before Dresden. In Slaughterhouse-Five, we have fictionalized scenes from the Battle of the Bulge, culminating in Billy’s capture along with the narrator and the stupid, vicious Roland Weary. Two skilled infantry scouts, initially part of the group, have ditched the incompetents. These elite soldiers both die, shot from behind at roughly the time the incompetents are being taken prisoner. Amid the killing and capturing one recurrently hears a Cerberus-like barking dog. It is the kind of thing one remembers.

These details are more or less corroborated in an interview where Vonnegut describes the particular circumstances of his own, real capture. The two accounts both seem realistic depictions, as Vonnegut puts it in the interview, of people running around getting lost while trying to imitate things they’d seen people do in war movies. The feckless 106th Division had been thrown sacrificially into the line. Among its drifting personnel somewhere in Luxembourg—as far as anyone could tell—were a hungry, disorganized, castoff mob of Americans cowering in a big trench—six members, including Vonnegut, of a battalion scouting unit, “and about fifty people we’d never met before.” The denouement of the group’s participation in the Battle of the Bulge proved swift and inglorious. “The Germans could see us,” says Vonnegut, “because they were talking to us through a loudspeaker. They told us our situation was hopeless, and so on. That was when we fixed bayonets. It was nice there for a few minutes.” Then the Germans started firing eighty-eight millimeter shells,” Vonnegut continues. “The shells burst in the treetops right over us. Those were very loud bangs right over our heads. We were showered with splintered steel. Some people got hit. Then the Germans told us again to come out.” It was nothing like the legendary heroism of the 101st Airborne in brave, encircled Bastogne. “We didn’t yell ‘nuts’ or anything like that. We said, ‘Okay,’ and ‘Take it easy,’ and so on.”

In other recollections, we learn a good bit about the actual Bernard V. O’Hare, Vonnegut’s “buddy,” under what was actually called the “buddy system,” from training at Camp Atterbury outside Indianapolis all the way through combat, capture, prison camp, Dresden, and home again until O’Hare’s death. We hear of other 106th enlisted men, including Tom Jones and his buddy, Joe Crone, the model for Billy Pilgrim, again a story stretching all the way back to Camp Atterbury. Even in training, Crone turns out to have been a hopeless soldier. Jones recalls, “when we went on a forced march I had to walk behind him and pick up all the utensils falling out of his backpack. He never could do it right.” Crone’s death actually occurred in Dresden. “I bunked with him when he died,” writes Jones. “One morning he woke up and his head was swollen like a watermelon and I talked him into going on sick call. By midday word came back that he had died.” We do not know of what. Everyone had raging dysentery at the time. Vonnegut ventures a small suspicion that Crone may have just “let himself starve to death before the firestorm.”

I must say I wonder simultaneously about possible autobiographical connections on the author’s part with a story, appearing nowhere else in any of Vonnegut’s World War texts save in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, describing the clinical etiology of the title character’s lifelong madness, while also explaining his childlike fascination with fire departments. In that story, set amid a kind of mini-Dresden firestorm of close combat, Rosewater, a brave, skillful, experienced, highly decorated US Army infantry captain, has gone catatonic after he rushed a furiously burning building somewhere in Germany—a clarinet factory, actually—allegedly defended by the worst of hardcore SS troops. In the smoke and confusion, he killed two Germans with a hand grenade and, after kicking him savagely in the groin, bayoneted another. They turned out to be three volunteer firemen in gas masks, the last a fourteen-year-old boy.

The etiology of the particular thing that came over him, Vonnegut says—the fit of personal aftershock, so to speak, that suddenly made it imperative that he write in these odd, myriad, manifestly unhinged (and thereby true) ways about his own experiences and those of others like him in World War II—was his fury at the Vietnam War, at the flagrant moral callousness of our leaders and the insensate moral stupidity of our policies. “We could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis. And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.” For this, many people at the time called him a literary cuckoo, an old vet gone soft in the head and, as one critic phrased it, sucking up to kiddie grievances. A pioneering critical study of his work during the era was actually entitled Insanity Plea.

A lot of us who had been to Vietnam, meanwhile, somehow understood that he was writing about his war and our war. And he gave us the courage, however crazy it may have seemed at the time, to put into language what we saw and what we had to report. They diagnosed a lot of us as well, called us head cases. “Good luck,” they always said before sending people out, recalls Michael Herr in Dispatches. “It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’” What did they expect when they got us back? When you got home, writes the soldier-narrator Philip Dosier in Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters, people would say, “You know, you’ve got the oddest, strangest look in your eyes. Why is that, hey? What have you seen?” “It is the look of the eyes,” he tells us, “for a long time called the thousand-yard stare, that blatant sparkle of light which does not shine. The glassy milky eyes not of the trenches, but of the ambush. It is the thousand-meter stare cranked down to fifty, to five. It is seemingly perfect concentration, blind rage; simple pleading; incomprehension. A surrender to cool perfect murder that defies sleep and warm soapy water. It is a reach to see everything at once; the limit of wakefulness; an urge to live; to stay awake. Because to let the eye wander, to drop that gaze, to fall asleep and slip into dreams, is to die.”

That is true, of course, of all wars—the combat symptomology, one might call it, of all those who have dwelt on death’s gray landscape. People still have quaint ocular expressions for this. “He saw combat with the 106th Division;” or, “he saw action in the South Pacific;” or, “he saw duty with the US Marines.” One supposes that is because memory and history always take place in the mind’s eye. As to war as the worst thing that can happen to people in the world, on the other hand, there seem to be those who have a preternatural ability to see it; not surprisingly, they turn out to be the broken ones who return from wherever they have been with some strange power of witness. Not that it takes a particular battle or a particular war. Here, one is reminded of a singular moment of family conversation in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye among the brothers Caulfield—Holden; the departed genius Allie, shortly gone to early death from juvenile leukemia (so it goes, one is tempted to say); and the older D. B., eventually to become the famous “prostitute” Hollywood screenwriter, on one of his short periods of home leave during four years of service in the US Army in World War II. (“I remember when he used to come home on furlough and all,” Holden recalls acutely, “all he did was lie on his bed, practically. He hardly ever even came in the living room.” As it turns out, he actually sees no real combat. Still, Allie suggests that being in the war for somebody like D. B., a writer, is surely not all bad, in that it gives him something to write about. D. B. counters by asking Allie who the best war poet is, Rupert Brooke or Emily Dickinson. It is a typical Salinger loaded question, with a side of Zen, but it makes the point; it is a point, of course, that could only have been made in this 1950s novel about wise American children by a shell-shocked former World War II GI in his midtwenties named J. D. Salinger. Nearly anyone normal, it is implied, would pick Rupert Brooke, the golden youth, royal naval brigade veteran of the doomed Antwerp expedition, famously dead of blood poisoning in the Aegean on his way to doomed Gallipoli—the strategic plans for both those great fatal adventures, it should be put on record, issuing from the juvenile, hopelessly erratic warrior genius of Winston Churchill. Rupert Brooke, author of “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” D. B. knows the better answer to the question, although he never says why. But then anyone who knows Emily Dickinson also knows why. Emily Dickinson, riding out the endless months and years of Civil War deaths being reported back and mourned in New England—truly, as Drew Gilpin Faust has recorded it in her eloquent title, This Republic of Suffering; Emily Dickinson, like Emerson before her, with her attacks of psychosomatic vision disorder, hysterical blindness one is tempted to call it: one can almost pick poems at random, as in “there’s a certain slant of light.”

Mad, goofy, mostly inarticulate Billy Pilgrim is surely no Rupert Brooke, let alone an Emily Dickinson. For quality of simple human passion in vision and witness, though, the optometrist of Ilium, New York, is right up there with the best. And nowhere is he better than in a 1968 family scene issuing from a bizarre convergence of plot lines whereby Billy finds himself the hospital roommate of one Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, Harvard professor and designated official historian of United States Army Air Corps strategic bombing campaigns in Europe during World War II. Aboard a doomed chartered airplane carrying him, along with his father-in-law, to a convention of fellow eye-care professionals, Billy has been dropped out of the sky on Sugarbush Mountain, Vermont. He has fractured his skull. His rescuers have been two Austrian ski instructors, speaking German behind their snow masks. Billy, accustomed to his time-travels among the Tralfamadorians, has “supposed that they were part of an amazing new phase of World War II.” As usual, he supposes right. In the same relation, he has just learned of the truly freakish accidental death of his wife, Valencia Merble Pilgrim, while driving to the hospital in her car with a damaged exhaust system, by mobile carbon monoxide poisoning (the early, experimental method the Germans used for killing their victims until they discovered Zyklon B and got really good at it). The car was a Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville with a “Reagan for President” sticker on the back. It was tail-ended by a Mercedes, which has suffered a broken headlight. “But the rear end of the Cadillac,” the narrator tells us, “was a body-and-fender man’s wet dream.” His daughter Barbara has arrived, stupefied with tranquilizers. His son Robert has been flown in on emergency “compassionate leave” from Green Beret duty in Vietnam. For most of his life after Dresden, Billy has just tried to be a good optometrist, somewhat lower than the physicians, a little above the lens grinders, helping people see. Now his work seems mostly to involve lying there in the hospital room, listening to Rumfoord, the great official historian of the great World War II bombing campaigns, pontificating. That, and the occasional attempt at witness. “I was in Dresden when it was bombed,” he interrupts at one point. “I was a prisoner of war.” “We don’t even have to talk about it,” he adds quietly. “I just want you to know.”

Not surprisingly, if the preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five is to be believed, Vonnegut himself seems to have been content to leave the message pretty much at that—although not without characteristic irritation at a latest aspirant to the title of master pontificator. The person who made him feel impelled, one last time, to defend the quality of his own vision and witness was the conservative intellectual George Will. The “owlish nitwit” so named, he says, had accused him of trivializing the Holocaust. Vonnegut’s retort was simple. Slaughterhouse-Five, he wrote, remained a book about which he has “no regrets.” “It is a non-judgmental expression of astonishment at what I saw and did in Dresden after it was firebombed so long ago, when, in the company of other prisoners of war and slave laborers who had survived the raid, I dug corpses from cellars and carried them, unidentified, their names recorded nowhere, to monumental funeral pyres. Their corpses could have been anybody, including me, and there were surely representative among them, whether collaborators or slaves or refugees, of every nation involved in the European half of World War II.” He goes on: “The drama at Auschwitz,” to be sure, “was about man’s inhumanity to man. The drama of any air raid on a civilian population, a gesture in diplomacy to a man like Henry Kissinger, is about the inhumanity of many of men’s inventions to man. That is the dominant theme of what I have written during the last forty-five years or so.” Or, as the humble Billy Pilgrim might have said—in fact, did say—to the pompous Bertram Copeland Rumfoord: “I was there. I just want you to know. I was there.”