Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 10th. I was their leader by virtue of the little German I spoke. It was our misfortune to have sadistic and fanatical guards. We were refused medical attention and clothing: We were given long hours at extremely hard labor. Our food ration was two-hundred-and-fifty grams of black bread and one pint of unseasoned potato soup each day. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles I told the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came. They beat me up a little. I was fired as group leader. Beatings were very small time: -- one boy starved to death and the SS Troops shot two for stealing food.
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.
When General Patton took Leipzig we were evacuated on foot to Hellexisdorf on the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39’s) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen but not me.
Eight of us stole a team and wagon. we traveled and looted our way through Sudetenland and Saxony for eight days, living like kings. The Russians are crazy about Americans. The Russians picked us up in Dresden. We rode from there to the American lines at Halle in Lend-Lease Ford trucks. We’ve since been flown to Le Havre.
I’m writing from a Red Cross Club in the Le Havre P.O.W. Repatriation Camp. I’m being wonderfully well feed and entertained. The state-bound ships are jammed, naturally, so I’ll have to be patient. I hope to be home in a month. Once home I’ll be given twenty-one days recuperation at Atterbury, about $600 back pay and -- get this -- sixty (60) days furlough!
I’ve too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait. I can’t receive mail here so don’t write.
May 29, 1945
Love,
Kurt - Jr.
Kurt Vonnegut
at Clowes Hall, Indianapolis,
April 27, 2007
Thank you.
I now stand before you as a role model, courtesy of Mayor Bart Peterson, and God bless him for this occasion.
If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
And just think of this: In only three years’ time, during World War Two, I went from Private to Corporal, a rank once held by both Napoleon and Adolf Hitler.
I am actually Kurt Vonnegut, Junior. And that’s what my kids, now in late middle age like me, still call me when talking about me behind my back: “Junior this and Junior that.”
But whenever you look at the Ayres clock at the Intersection of South Meridian and Washington Streets, please think of my father, Kurt Vonnegut, Senior, who designed it. As far as that goes, he and his father, Bernard Vonnegut, designed the whole darn building. And he was a founder of The Orchard School and The Children’s Museum.
His father, my grandfather the architect Bernard