As he picked up a body, the charred skin broke and a yellow liquid seeped from it.

William V. Spanos, who was a prisoner of war, was ordered by German soldiers to dispose of the bodies after the destruction. He saw piles of 40 bodies before him that he had to carry to a wagon to be taken away, one body with “seared skin, some of which was turning into liquid.”

Images like these gripped members of the Binghamton University community Thursday evening as Spanos, a BU English professor, read about his experience of the Dresden bombings during World War II. Listeners crammed into the Reinhardt Room in Library North — some even standing or sitting on the floor — to hear excerpts from Spanos’ “Infernal Journey: A World War II Memoir.”

American and British bombers raided Dresden, Germany in February 1945, destroying 11 square miles of city, killing an estimated 100,000 people and igniting a firestorm that sent temperatures over 2,700 degrees.

“Dresden was reduced to a wasteland of charred, mutilated and stinking bodies,” Spanos said.

Spanos went into battle at age 18 and was captured by Axis forces at age 19. In 1964 he graduated from the University of Wisconsin and has been pursuing an intellectual life ever since. The intellectual journey has provided him with the language to write the book and it is this experience that he is passing down.

The book is largely a response to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” which was also written about Dresden, but veiled underneath a fictional story. Spanos said he was dissatisfied with Vonnegut’s novel and was motivated to write a realistic version of the bombings.

Spanos was taken as a prisoner of war before the bombings occurred so he wrote of the incident from the perspective of a victim. Americans were portrayed as borderline demonic, which drew some listeners in.

“The part that I found fascinating is that he sided with the Germans,” said David Ames, a sophomore political science major.

Spanos described waiting nervously on the ground along with thousands of Germans for the explosion that would end their lives. He was huddled in a fetal position and at one point felt “wetness creeping down my thighs.”

Spanos’s message to his readers is that what he experienced is being duplicated everywhere in the world.

Describing the chaos and terror of the situation, Spanos held nothing back, even saying that the B-17s were “pterodactyls dropping their loads from their anuses.”

“For that’s the world we were in — a world of shit,” he said.