I was lugging around Jim Harrison’s thought about how novelists and poets carry a window 'in order to look at what I wish, that my calling is to become this window' [1] when I bumped into Vonnegut’s preface to Slaughterhouse Five:
I have no regrets about this book, which the owlish nitwit George Will said trivialized the Holocaust. 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 lures. The corpses could have been anybody, including me, and there were surely representatives among them, whether collaborators or slaves or refugees, of ever nation involved in he European half of World War II.How could I be nonjudgmental? It was bombs that had done the killing. I had several decent and honorable and courageous friends who were pilots or bombardiers. Actions of men like them on the Dresden raid required no more fury and loathing or angry vigor than would have jobs on an automobile assembly line.
[1] The Summer He Didn't Die, Jim Harrison