Dear people:

Today I stumbled upon the very awesome blog Letters of Note. In their own words, “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” From the letter of a child detailing his rocket ship designs “to a top scientist,” to a letter from Einstein proclaiming that “the word God is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” this blog could entertain you for hours. But what struck me was a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr to his family after he escaped Dresden at the end of World War II. The experiences outlined in Vonnegut’s letter are both horrifying and incredibly worthy of respect. And on an even more visceral level, it makes me feel like writers today are all academic pansies. How many modern writers do you know “were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters” or lived through a massive bombing raid that “killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden?” Horrible as it may be, it’s also pretty badass.

This experience of Vonnegut’s and the events outlined in this letter are what inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which was what his underground slaughterhouse-cum-prison was known as to his German captors. Vonnegut’s letter is not only an enlightening piece of literary history, it is a fantastic document of world history as well. It demonstrates to us how awful war is, how children writing to their parents had to begin letters with statements like “I’m told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’”

I’ve posted the scans of the letter below, which were originally available here at archive.org. If you check out Vonnegut’s letter at Letters of Note, you can read it transcribed as well and may soon find yourself sifting through all the other letters in their collection.