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Helen Bamber
As a young girl growing up in London in the 1930s, Helen Bamber was all too aware of the nightmare unfolding in Nazi Germany. Her father, a Jew of Polish extraction who spoke fluent German, would tune in nightly to Radio Berlin to monitor the latest outpouring of hate.
His anguish, and the determined efforts he made through his work as an accountant for a firm with German connections to help those trying to flee, had a profound effect on his daughter.
When the full horror of the “Final Solution” started to emerge at the end of World War Two, Helen, aged 20, immediately volunteered for work in Belsen concentration camp, helping rehabilitate surviving inmates.
On her arrival, she says, there were “still awful sights, amputees, gangrene, festering sores. People still looked terribly emaciated…sometimes when you were searching through things you were reminded of the enormity of it: once we came across a vast pile of shoes, sorted according to sizes, including children’s, all neatly lined up; you were never safe from that kind of confrontation.”
From the camp’s survivors Helen learnt that: “Above all else, there was a need to tell you everything, over and over and over again. They would need to hold on to you, and many of them still had very thin arms…it wasn’t so much grief as a pouring out of some ghastly vomit like a kind of horror…”
Helen was to stay more than two years, for Belsen remained open long after the war ended as a transit camp for those who had lost their homes. On her return to Britain, she was then asked to help care for a group of orphans who had survived Auschwitz.
After joining Amnesty International in 1961, Helen began meeting frequently with refugees who had suffered torture and soon came to the realisation that they often required dedicated long term care.
To meet that need, Helen in 1985 established the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, the only organisation in Britain today dedicated solely to helping survivors of torture.
More than 25,000 people from more than 100 countries have been helped at the Medical Foundation’s north London treatment centre, with a range of free services that include medical, psychiatric and psychological assessment and treatment, and rehabilitation, both short and long term, through social care, casework and counselling, psychotherapy, physiotherapy and other complementary treatments.
Helen was named European Woman of Achievement in 1993 and in 1997 she was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire).- Helen Bamber (pdf)
