Twelve days later, he wrote a letter to his wife, Irene, attempting to convey the dread of what he had recently witnessed. That letter has survived and is quoted in a memoir by the couple’s son. While its content is disturbing, it does not begin to compare with the horror of having been present.
Shortly after the end of WWII, Kantor embarked on writing Andersonville, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. During the American Civil War, Andersonville had been a camp for Union POWs, where 13,000 prisoners died from malnutrition, scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery.
In side-by-side comparisons of photographs of starving inmates in German concentration camps and the barely-surviving prisoners at Andersonville, the resemblance is all too disturbing—especially at this moment when the world is once again at war, and non-combatant fatalities and other atrocities are as commonplace as ever.
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The full story is told in a new book of essays by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025), which can be ordered online here.
