The series of this pain should not continue!
The magic of life and death,
Is spread in all directions,
Relief comes with tribulations,
Troubles come with fortitude,
Each footstep is laden with darkness,
Light is in the hands of Time,
What should I comment on the event unfurled?
A moment of false comfort.
Life, again in this torture cell,
The Day of Judgement in every epoch,
A blood bath of humanity,
If only one could interpret this nightmare.
The only desire that still remains, friends!
The series of this pain should never be born again!
- Anwar Nadeem (1937-2017)
Translated from Urdu by Saira Mujtaba
The English translation above is of the only poem ever written in Urdu on the Holocaust (Shoah), the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The Urdu poem was originally published in the trilingual brochure (Urdu, Hindi , and English) of a Holocaust films retrospective held in Lucknow, India, in 2009. It was the first ever Holocaust films retrospective in South Asia. Please find the article "The Only Urdu Poem on the Holocaust and its Author" by Dr. Navras J. Aafreedi, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata and Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), New York here.
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