Kurt Vonnegut

ON FEBRUARY 13th 1945, Kurt Vonnegut sat in an underground meat locker in Dresden, Germany, listening to the city above him being destroyed. He and the other prisoners of war, captured as they wandered behind enemy lines, had been consigned to make vitamin syrup for pregnant mothers, trying to ignore the ominous “Schlachthof-Funf” (Slaughterhouse-Five) daubed on the door.

Now they simply listened. One prisoner made a joke. “Nobody laughed,” Mr Vonnegut wrote later, “but we were all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.” Sitting in a slaughterhouse as the sky rained fire, his life proved by a joke, Mr Vonnegut found the path that would define him for the rest of his life.