This article examines, for the first time, a significant aspect of Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971: the fate of ‘stranded Bengalis’ in West Pakistan during and after the war. The war ended with over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) captured in East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh, who were then transferred to Indian custody. The government of Pakistan responded by holding hostage roughly the same number of Bengali military personnel, civil servants, and their dependants in West Pakistan as leverage for the return of its captured POWs. Neither group would return home immediately in what arguably became one of the largest cases of mutual mass internment post-1945. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources, both official and personal, this article traces the trajectory of this crisis of captivity in which the Bengali officials and officers—hitherto serving the Pakistani state—found themselves as rightless citizens with ‘enemy’ status after December 1971. Their wartime experiences, more than half a century after the war, warrant recognition in widening the understanding of 1971, not only in the history of regional and global politics but also at what was arguably the home front—a thousand miles away from the ‘war zone’ in East Pakistan.