By Nahreen Ahmed
The drones were so loud I could barely hear my own thoughts. I could feel the buzzing in my chest, yet scarier still were the thunderous blasts of missile strikes less than 200 meters away. The walls shook with every boom. Plaster from the ceiling crumbled around us as we pushed our mattresses up against the windows, but not before sneaking a peek outside.
Israeli tanks surrounded the building. We walked down to the emergency room, and several flights of stairs later, were met with black smoke filling the first floor of Nasser Hospital. There were people everywhere. Some patients, others just seeking safety—they presumed the hospital grounds would be spared.
Amidst the chaos, I felt an overwhelming feeling of connection to a person I had never met. It was my grandfather, Dr. Shamsuddin Ahmed, a surgeon killed by the Pakistani Army during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, for continuing to treat patients at a hospital complex of Sylhet Medical College. His story taught me that healthcare workers and hospitals in wartime are never safe, and yet somehow, I found myself on the verge of repeating our family’s history.
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My Dadabhai, Dr. Shamsuddin Ahmed, was a very loved and respected clinician and leader in his profession. He strongly believed in equitable access to healthcare, and one way he advanced this belief was through Eye Camps, where he organized free cataract surgeries that restored vision to countless people who would have otherwise gone untreated. Providing dignified medical care with empathy and respect was central to who he was as a person. He carried a profound awareness of the responsibilities that healthcare workers bear, especially during times of political instability.
During the 1969 mass uprising against the rule of Field Marshal Ayub Khan, following the killing of Professor Dr. Shamsuzzoha at the University of Rajshahi for defending his students, my Dadabhai spoke out to advocate for the protection of students, faculty, and healthcare workers.
The professor’s death became a turning point in the anti-Ayub movement, galvanizing protests across East Pakistan, hastening the regime’s fall, and foreshadowing the revolution that would engulf the nation just two years later. In choosing to raise his voice at that moment as a physician, not a politician, my dadabhai made clear that his duty extended beyond the clinic walls. These values were not abstract ideals to him; they were principles he practiced daily, and they would ultimately guide his actions when his life was most at risk.
On April 8, 1971, Dr. Shamsuddin Ahmed stopped at his uncle’s home, as was his usual practice.
“Why are you going to the hospital during this tumultuous time?” his uncle pleaded. ““You should go to the village where your family is — and be safe.”
“No, my responsibility is here. The Pakistani army cannot kill me. I am a doctor working in a hospital.”
While so many healthcare workers rightfully fled, he and several others remained behind to continue to treat their patients, whom they felt they could not abandon — for if they did, who would look after them? The following day, on the 9th of April, the Pakistani army arrived.
They breached international humanitarian law and mass executed the remaining healthcare workers, including my grandfather.
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And as I stood in the black smoke engulfing Nasser Hospital, about to come under siege, I finally understood why he decided to remain at his post despite knowing the Pakistani Army was on its way, despite knowing he may leave his entire family behind:
Our humanity should not be diminished by fear.
It was a realization that did not simply come from my time in Gaza, but was inherited—passed down through stories shaped by war, silence, and survival, beginning in earnest with my grandfather during the bloodied birth of Bangladesh
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Growing up, I remember hearing only a finite number of stories about my grandparents during the liberation war. Stories of the efforts they took to protect their children. Stories of how they forged a life in a newly independent Bangladesh. But there are just as many, if not more, untold stories.
Stories hidden beneath unhealed trauma. Stories that explain some of the eccentricities defining the immigrant experience. Stories that create unintentional barriers between parents and children in the diaspora. In the midst of the genocide in Gaza, I began to understand why so many of those stories remain untold.
I once asked a nurse in Gaza, “How are you all coping with what you’ve seen?” The response was simple from his end.
“If we dwell too much on what we have seen, it will destroy us. We must keep moving. We must keep working”.
My father fought in the Bangladesh Liberation War and a majority of untold stories are from his own experiences. One of the few stories I was told was that of my grandfather asking him, before he enlisted, if it was a cause worth risking his life for. That moment unintentionally recreated the first time I left for Gaza in January 2024. When I returned, he asked me what it was like. I told him what I witnessed, and for the first time in my adult life, felt we connected over a shared experience.
In that moment of connection, I realized that the component of my humanity centered on standing firmly behind a cause was a direct result of the stories I heard in my childhood, however few they were.
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Returning to Gaza in March 2024, the vast destruction across the Strip was gutting to witness. Colleagues spoke of family members lost or separated since I last saw them, and of neighbors’ children they had taken in as their own. The depth of community-building was humbling.
My mind returned to the story of my mother and her siblings during the Liberation War of 1971, in which they too endured a period of separation.
My mother shared the story of her father, who made the choice to leave West Pakistan in 1970, as tensions were rising in East Pakistan. He provided housing, counsel and even financial support for so many during that time. He raised 7 daughters and 2 sons, never allowing his daughters to feel different from his sons, a quality that shines brightly from my mother.
She recalls being unafraid when the Pakistani army raided their house in Dhaka — all of their things turned inside out and she remembers showing no external fear. Her father had to make a difficult decision: keep the entire family together in Dhaka or leave by boat and risk separation. With 7 daughters, he worried about moving so many women when stories of assault were rampant at the time. He uttered a line that I have heard so many times in Gaza.
“If anything should happen, let it happen here in my home. If we are to die, so be it”.
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On my third trip to Gaza in October of 2024, I experienced the generosity of spirit and hospitality core to the Palestinian people. It is something I witness in our own culture as Bangladeshis and is an ingrained part of who I am.
Every person I have ever met in Gaza has invited me back to their home, offering food and tea— limited commodities in a time of ongoing famine. It was an invitation extended to all my international colleagues, whether they are Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Jewish.
I reflected on this with a family friend who is Bangladeshi and Hindu. She shared with me the journey her aunts and uncles took across Bangladesh to safety in India, as the Pakistani army targeted the Hindu population of Bangladesh. She spoke of Muslim strangers who hid her relatives, risking their own lives, and of families listening anxiously to the radio for the names of loved ones who survived the trek.
I had read about these histories while educating myself on the bloody birth of Bangladesh, but the personal storytelling brought it to life in a heartbreaking way. These overwhelming examples of kindness and compassion are a huge part of what has shaped me, moving me to open my home and my heart to anyone in need.
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As I navigate my career, I often find myself in vulnerable situations, whether it is conducting end-of-life conversations in an American ICU or witnessing the depth of human cruelty and forced resilience in crisis and conflict zones.
Throughout it all, retaining my humanity has been a core part of survival in the tumultuous world we live in, and its components come from decades of storytelling across the Bangladeshi community.
Storytelling is an act of courage. It is an intentional form of resistance against the erasure and silence that injustices thrive in, fighting to preserve hope and sustain collective memory.
In Bangladeshi households, these stories are often passed in fragments; in war zones, they are often buried entirely. In both cases, what is lost is not just memory, but moral responsibility. Given the injustices we are witnessing in our own backyard and abroad, we must now, more than ever, continue to document our stories. It is the conduit by which we connect as humans, realize our shared traumas, and confront the ways we are all more similar than different.
We cannot escape our history, but we can use storytelling to explore how it has shaped us, how it will guide our futures, and how it can bring our world just a tiny bit closer to peace.
Author’s Note
I finished writing this piece while sitting with my parents in Sylhet and Dhaka, surrounded by our family’s history. It is a privilege I do not take for granted, as I have seen my Palestinian colleagues suffer through separation from family and the inability to leave or re-enter Gaza due to Israel’s restrictions by way of occupation.
As I discussed this essay with my parents, more of their untold stories continued to surface—far more than I can recount in these pages. Among them, my mother shared a memory of seeing the exchange of gunfire from the third floor of her family home in Dhaka, and how a grenade struck her medical school while she was inside, leaving a colleague with a spinal injury that left her paralyzed for life.
The culmination of these stories, layered atop the history of Bangladesh and my own experiences, make it clear that acts of courage and resilience echo not only across generations, but every war zone and conflict I have encountered. Through it all, one thing remains clear: healthcare workers and hospitals continue being targeted, despite this constituting a war crime.
My hope with this essay is to break that silence and encourage others to do the same. Our shared storytelling of these repeated events is a crucial part of the resistance and the awareness needed to ensure accountability.
References
Ahmad, N., & Sultan, F. (1977). Popular Uprising in Pakistan. MERIP Reports, 58, 14–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/3010840
A BRIEF TRIUMPH FOR STUDENT POWER. (1969). Minerva, 7(4), 783–812. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41822666
Burki, S. J. (1972). Ayub’s Fall: A Socio-Economic Explanation. Asian Survey, 12(3), 201–212. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642873
Mahmoud, H. (2025, December 30). A decimated Gaza marks the end of another year of Israeli bombs. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/12/30/a-year-of-israeli-bombs-has-decimated-gazas-infrastructure
Remembering Dr Shamsuddin: A man of immense courage. (2020). The Daily Star. https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/remembering-dr-shamsuddin-man-immense-courage-2010885
Image Sources
- https://www.genocidebangladesh.org/1972/
- https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2016/04/22/race-to-digitise-photographs-chronicling-the-birth-of-bangladesh
- https://www.liberationwarmuseumbd.org/page/photo-archive
- https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/9/15/images-show-destruction-of-gaza-city-by-israeli-attacks
- CBS News. (2024, February 25). American doctor describes ‘incomparable’ devastation in Gaza impacting children as Israel-Hamas war continues [TV series episode]. 60 Minutes. CBS.
- UK-Med. (2024). Photographs of medical deployments in Gaza.
About the Author
Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, MD, MPH is a second-generation Bangladeshi American and practicing pulmonary/critical care physician. She is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and has previously served as Medical Director of the NGO MedGlobal, where she led emergency medical response efforts and training in conflict and disaster settings. Dr. Ahmed has worked extensively in war zones and humanitarian crises, including Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, Sierra Leone, and Rohingya refugee camps.
Her experiences have been covered by Democracy Now, NPR, Al Jazeera News, 60 minutes on CBS Network, and various other media outlets. Deeply informed by her Bangladeshi heritage and family history, her advocacy and work in the field seeks to preserve humanity in the midst of conflict—providing medical care, bearing witness, and carrying forward the stories of those too often silenced.