There were tens of millions of letters sent home by troops serving overseas during the Second World War. For most of these young people, the war was their first time overseas and, for most, their first encounter with the incredible range of brutality and evil actually practiced by mankind. I always tend to think of the typical American draftee of the 1940’s as be somewhat innocently naiveté, a product of the Judo Christian hard work / moral living ethic of the time.
Private Harold Porter, a medic in the U.S. Army’s 116th Evacuation Field Hospital, was absolutely stunned and bewildered by the Nazi brutality he encountered when American forces liberated the Dachau death near Munich. His letter to his parents is contained in a remarkable book by Rod Gragg titled “From Foxholes and Flight Decks, Letters Home From World War Two.” The Waffen S.S. was in charge of the camp; when they fled in the faced of the advancing Americans they left behind many personal effects, including their elegant stationery embossed with the double lighting bolt S.S. logo. Porter wrote to his parents on some of this “liberated” letterhead, as reproduced above. In the letter he struggled to find word to describe the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. “It is difficult to know how to begin,” he explained. “I have recovered from my first emotional shock and am able to write without seeming like a hysterical gibbering idiot. Yet, I know you will hesitate to believe me no matter how objective and factual I try to be. I even tried myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes…Atrocities must be seen before they can be believed.”
This inability to adequately express the full range of the atrocities discovered conflicted author Kurt Vonnegut in writing his novel “Slaughter House Five.” The author writes, substituting his fictional character Billy Pilgrim for himself, of his experiences of surviving the horrors and aftermath of the allied bombing of the German city of Dresden. Vonnegut evidently concluded that it would be impossible for him to write of his experiences in a conventional straightforward linear presentation that would just overwhelm the reader with the sheer magnitude of the horror and instead chose to write in the circular fashion that still manages to convey to the reader the life long impact of the war experience on the beholder.
Just as Vonneguts fictional character Pilgrim was amazed at the irony of another character, poor old Derby, being executed for having stolen a teapot from the ruins of Dresden, Harold Porter was astonished by the irony in touring the S.S. officer’s quarters in Cachau. “The surprising thing to me was the normalcy of his life,” Porter reported. “There were pictures of his wife, his little girls, …..yet within view of his office window was the mound of corpses beside the crematory.”
