Radiographs of Memory

In radiology, we’re taught to see the subtle. To catch what others miss. To read the fractures beneath the skin, the scars beneath silence. I used to think of CT scans and X-rays as cold means to ‘know’ a patient. In reality, we unveil truth beneath the surface. Interpreting not only what is present, but what once was… and what could be. 

In my journey to become a radiologist, I took on the challenge of the high-stakes United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1, an eight-hour exam that could allow me to continue my journey in medicine, or in eight short hours, end it all. I sat for it weeks ahead of schedule, carving out an unexpected gift… eight weeks entirely to myself before starting my third year of medical school in Sarasota. 

In what felt like one of the last true liberations of time in my life, I set out to travel. Backpacking across 18 countries, from Ireland to Ukraine. I wanted to make memories that would carry me through the long nights of medical school and residency. 

One destination on my bucket list was Poland, in an attempt to understand, in some deeper way, what truly happened during World War II. That path led me to Oświęcim, Poland, a landmark village home to the remains of one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

As a child, my parents had taken me abroad to the emerald sweeps of Siberia, the richness of the present-day Ottoman world in the Middle East, and the ancient ruins of early civilizations in Mexico. I thought I had a grasp on history. As a lifelong learner, I believed I would arrive in each country with something to draw from, either in context, culture, or memory. 

I thought I would know. 

But Auschwitz taught me otherwise. 

Walking those grounds, I didn’t see ghosts. 
I saw density, compressed grief in every photo, bone-like memory in every structure. 
Not the kind you’d find on a T2-weighted MRI, bright and fluid, easily visible. 
This was different. Heavier. 
The kind that pulls everything inward, like gravity anchoring a hidden truth beneath the surface. 

That’s trauma.  

It hides in the body’s blind spots. In the costophrenic angles of history. 

At Auschwitz, there was no life in those rooms, hallways, courtyards. 
To call it devoid is insufficient. 
It felt like loss. The same kind you feel in grief, in lost time, in the silence that follows sickness. A loss beyond interpretation. 

In radiology, we call it loss of volume when a lung collapses. 

That’s what I felt stepping under the iron arch that read Arbeit Macht Frei. 
Translated to English: “Work will set you free.” 
A bitter lie. 
A cruel, calculated psychological weapon. 
Manipulation cast in iron. 

Those interred at Auschwitz didn’t know what was coming. For many, it was their first glimpse of the camp… and that phrase promised dignity through labor.  

It was meant to disarm, to deceive, to delay the terror. 

The silence around those grounds is unlike any silence I have known. 
A silence thick with meaning, as if the air itself still recoils from that betrayal. 

A collapse of meaning. 

But then I remembered… lungs re-expand. 
…memory breathes. 

On departure, the silence soon was replaced with a toll.  

A toll of the aftermath upon our Jewish, Polish, Roma, Disabled, LGBT+ communities in the European Union, the USA, and worldwide. 

As a medical student, this experience is not a one-off, because these survivors are still alive. Not too long after, I cared for a Holocaust survivor during a clinical rotation. A quiet man. His medical chart was unassuming, but he carried layers of history far deeper than any image could reveal or teach to me.  

One afternoon, as I reviewed his labs and scans with him, he reached out and said softly, “Thank you for spending time with me.” Had I not paused to understand who he was, his story and past thatbrought him to the hospital bed as a suffering patient, I would have never known the adversities he had overcome. It was a moment that crystallized the invisible wounds trauma leaves and the profound duty we have to treat patients as whole people, not just cases on a screen, or patients on a chart. 

Which is why moments like these serve as consistent reminders at the core of the Florida State University’s mission to “be responsive to community needs, especially through service to elder, rural, minority, and underserved populations.” 

Words that are simple, but carry an immense amount of meaning in how we carry out our missions, and what these mean to our patients. 

In the course of my career, I will come across survivors of genocide from Bosnia, Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, and Palestine as patients, but I will also work alongside these survivors as fellow healthcare personnel, as I do currently. 

To each and every patient, to each and every colleague in this career, we owe every sense of decency and respect for the atrocities they bear. 

“Every man has a duty to his fellow man,” Hemingway wrote. “You have to live by it. You have to die by it.” 

And yet… they live. 

That’s the quiet miracle. 

Auschwitz is a place of death, yes… the world’s most notable, and a lesson for us all. 
But also, sadly, one of many places. 
A place where liberation is not just a date in 1945, but rather ongoing. 

What do we as physicians, future or current, need to take away from experiences such as these?  

To whom do we owe the deepest respect in this medical profession? 

To every patient who survives genocide, who arrives at the doorstep of this nation carrying unspeakable weight, and still shows up to embrace America’s promise, to contribute, to heal.  

To every child born free from inherited fear. 

To every time we, as doctors, choose to bear witness… not just to treat and discharge, but to see, to listen, to understand. 

That is true liberation happening again in perpetuity. 

In today’s world, genocide still walks among us. 
Not always in camps, but in ethnic cleansings, displacements, walls, wires, and erasures. 

But so does freedom. 

Freedom is not abstract. 
It’s felt in lungs that breathe freely, in pain that is named, in trauma that is honored rather than ignored. 

And it is our duty, as physicians and as people, to preserve it. 
Like air. 
Like memory. 

Because when the bell tolls… and it still tolls… we must not only hear it. 

We must respond. 
With medicine. 
With memory. 
With love- 

the final, and perhaps the truest, kind of freedom.