In December 2024, I visited the sites of the Holocaust—Treblinka, Auschwitz, the ghettos of Jewish resistance, and the killing fields of Karkawa in Poland. When I set foot on the soil of Treblinka, it felt as though the blood had been shed only recently and the mass graves had just been dug. It was as if the Holocaust had happened yesterday—the memory and the wound still painfully fresh.

Six million Jews—men, women, and children—were wiped from the face of the earth simply because they were Jews. Others who were targeted included the Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, the disabled, pregnant women, and countless innocent civilians.

Although these events took place in the fourth decade of the twentieth century—a period often associated with progress and enlightenment—the world’s most prominent leaders remained largely silent. Figures such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, along with religious authorities like the Pope, did not raise their voices forcefully enough against the genocide unfolding in Europe. Across Germany and Poland, concentration camps operated while much of the world looked away.

Had global leaders, scientists, intellectuals, scholars, writers, and poets—aside from a few exceptions like Bertolt Brecht and George Orwell, and those involved in the ghetto uprisings—united in opposition to Adolf Hitler and Nazism, perhaps the world would be a better place today. The phrase “Never Again” was not spoken loudly enough when it mattered most.

In South Asia, the Sindhi poet Shaikh Ayaz stands out for his tribute to Anne Frank and his condemnation of Nazism. Through his poetry, generations of Sindhi readers came to know the suffering of Anne Frank and the Jewish people.

To my deep sorrow, similar atrocities occurred under British colonial rule in India. The British established detention camps known as “Lorrha” (hedges) in Sindh, where the Hur community—followers of Pir Pagaro—were imprisoned. Men, women, and children were detained; many were born, lived, and died within barbed-wire enclosures. Hur men were subjected to torture, forced labor, and execution for resisting British rule. These camps continued until 1952, even after the British left the subcontinent following Partition. Their spiritual leader, Pir Pagaro Sibghatullah Shah, was executed.

Britain owes an apology for........

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