Thus we see

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. The following poem pays tribute to those who carry the legacy of that war.

The memories of war are embodied forever. I wrote this poem some months after a 65-year-old man consulted me in the mid-1980s complaining of a band of chest pain that two cardiologists had investigated without diagnosis. As a Polish prisoner-of-war in World War II, he had been enslaved in a German coalmine, starved and inadequately clothed. He described to me how, as winter progressed, he and his fellow prisoners would wire the decaying pieces of their clothes together. His shirt was reduced to a band of fabric around the middle of his chest. His current chest pain was in the same anatomical zone as that covered 45 years before by the remnants of his shirt.