Poetry and songs echoed through the auditorium while canvases outside captured the weariness of the road, the pain of displacement and the determination to survive, as Dhaka’s Liberation War Museum hosted a poignant remembrance of the refugee experience of 1971 on Saturday.

Organised by Smrity ’71, the commemorative programme, titled “Refugee Life of ’71” and “September on Jessore Road,” brought together poetry, music and visual art to revisit the memories and struggles of millions who were forced to flee their homes during the Liberation War.

It opened with the national anthem and was moderated by Jinnat Ara Haque.

Speaking about the programme as a whole, Faruk H. Khan set out the historical background of the 1971 refugee crisis and of September on Jessore Road, the poem by the American poet Allen Ginsberg. He described how the human catastrophe of people who left their homes and ordinary lives to cross the border had found a universal language in Ginsberg's verse.

Mustaq Ahmed and Nazneen Pappu then recited selected passages from the 152-line poem, which speaks of the refugees' hunger, uncertainty, death, separation and desperate search for shelter. Nabanita Habid Chowdhury followed with the well-known song inspired by the poem, made popular by Mousumi Bhowmik.

The programme also screened the Liberation War Museum's documentary Ekattorer Sharanarthi ("Refugees of '71"). Alongside the film, eyewitnesses of 1971 shared their own memories from the stage.

Freedom fighter Mahbub Zaman brought onto the stage artists who had visited training camps during the war to lift the fighters' morale. Several young people honoured them by draping them with ceremonial shawls.

Among the recollections, the most affecting was that of the reciter Bhaskar Bandyopadhyay, who recalled losing his mother in a refugee column in 1971. "Behind the vast sweep of the war's history, lie the breakup of a family and the private grief of a child."

Mofidul Hoque, a trustee of the Liberation War Museum, author and publisher, said the refugee experience of 1971 deserves recognition as an important human record of the Liberation War. Leaving one's country, he said, is not merely a matter of statistics. It is the history of the personal lives, memories and losses of millions of people.

Vocalist Shahin Samad recalled how music had helped sustain people's morale during the war, calling song a form of resistance in the cultural struggle of that time.

Shankar Lal Saha and freedom fighter Siraj Faraji also shared their refugee experiences. Their accounts recalled the journey out of the country, the uncertainty of finding shelter, and the daily struggle of ordinary people to survive the war.

Mahbub Zaman of Smrity '71 said that during the war, song, poetry and art were never mere entertainment. By visiting the training camps, artists became a means of sustaining the fighters' spirit.

While the auditorium relived 1971 through memory and testimony, another kind of artistic journey unfolded outside. Some of the country's leading painters captured fragments of refugee life on canvas. War, exile, the fatigue of the road, shelter and the longing to survive took on new form under their brushes.

Together, the recitation, music, documentary, eyewitness accounts and paintings offered a way to see the 1971 refugee crisis not just as an event of the past but through people's memories and experiences.

Allen Ginsberg wrote September on Jessore Road out of what he witnessed of the refugee crisis in 1971. The poem later became one of the best-known records of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the refugee crisis in international cultural memory. Smrity '71's programme was an effort to return to that history and place the lives, voices and memories of the 1971 refugees before a new generation.