Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's group of American prisoners of war survived the attack. The Germans had kept them in an underground room for storing meat at a slaughterhouse. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) and the Allied POWs used that name for their prison. Vonnegut said the result of the attack was complete destruction and death that nobody could understand. This experience gave him ideas for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. His experience of death and destruction is a central theme in at least six of his other books.  In Slaughterhouse-Five he described the city as looking like the surface of the moon after the bombing. He told about how the Germans making the prisoners work. They had to break into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies. They had to bury these dead people all together in large holes while German people threw rocks at them and shouted curses. Vonnegut said later, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."