Always connect with the good


August 25, 2014
Sarah Benton

Three of the best obituaries are reposted here, from The Scotsman, The Telegraph and The Guardian


Photo of Helen Bamber in 2012 by Nancy Honey.

Obituary: Helen Bamber, OBE

By Fred Bridgland, The Scotsman
August 25, 2014

Born: 1 May, 1925, in London. Died: 21 August, 2014, in London

Every so often a truly great person leaves us. Not “great” in the conventional sense of famous or powerful, but great by way of having lived a life imbued with love, kindness, good cheer and selfless motives.

Such a person was Helen Bamber, founder and director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. In a 70-year career as a psychotherapist she bore witness to myriad horror stories, listening to clients from throughout the world for as long as they wished or could bear to talk.

“She knows the evil of mankind, and she won’t put up with it,” the late Dr John Rundle, a Glasgow-trained neurologist who worked with Bamber’s Foundation for nearly 30 years, once said of his colleague: “It’s a crusade if you like. But it’s not done as a zealot, it’s done as a human being.”

On entering the foundation’s premises in north London, you walk past rooms full of different people, of all nationalities, cultures and skin colours. Their faces are marked with the lines and scars of struggle: you can only wonder about their history. Where are they from? How did they offend the mighty in their homelands? Were they beaten, starved, psychologically tortured, locked in solitary? Can they ever be happy again?

Helen Bamber, who has died aged 89 following a year-long illness, believed that totalitarianism is evil and must be resisted and that the state exists to enhance the life of the individual, not the other way around. Through her work at the foundation, she and her professional colleagues helped tens of thousands of men, women and children from throughout the world to confront the horror and brutality of their experiences.

She described torture as an attempt to kill a person, physically and spiritually, without their dying. I interviewed her after she treated two Zimbabwean journalists, Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto, who had been terribly tortured over 12 consecutive days at a military detention camp near Harare. Their “crime”? They had described in their newspaper an attempted coup by army officers against president Robert Mugabe.

“We’ve conquered so much [in the modern world] in terms of medicine and science, but we’ve learned relatively little about ourselves – and we are very cruel beasts,” Bamber told me.

“Torture is about total helplessness and total power, the deliberate destruction of people. I seek more understanding of why we carry violence within us so that, given certain opportunities, it spurts out into cruelty.”

However, she said she had discovered that people can overcome the most appalling tragedies: “They have their strengths, coping mechanisms and humour. But they need recognition and compassion from others if they are to survive and overcome their pasts.

“I’m not without my desolation and despair from time to time because it’s pretty rotten out there. But mostly I find listening so rewarding and humbling. In the end, I’m always inspired by the beauty of the human spirit.”

It was in 1945 that Helen Bamber made the decision that was to shape her life. She was just 19, when she told her parents that she was going with the Jewish Relief Unit to the Belsen concentration camp, in northern Germany, where more than 50,000 people – including Anne Frank and her sister Margot – died and where, when it was liberated, British soldiers found 13,000 corpses lying unburied.

She felt compelled to see and smell Belsen, to understand the dreadful aftermath of Nazism. She described the aroma of death pervading the camp as “like the sweet smell of geraniums if you crush them”.

It was there that Bamber decided that the world was divided into two camps: bystanders and witnesses. Bystanders saw what they wanted, turned away when it suited them, denied the evidence if necessary. Witnesses had a duty to observe and report truthfully.

Bamber was a tiny, immaculately dressed woman, with artfully decorated finger nails who said: “It sounds very pompous, but the evil that can be done to human beings is something that has dominated my life. I was always aware that if the Nazis had succeeded in invading Britain, we [Jewish citizens] would have been the victims.”

Helen in her twenties. Photo by PA.

Bamber, on return from Belsen, worked with the Jewish Refugee Committee before spending three decades campaigning for Amnesty International, where she started a group to help torture victims. Amnesty decided that treating torture victims as well as campaigning against the regimes that abused them was too broad a remit, which spurred her in 1985 to launch the Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture.

By the time of her death, the foundation had more than 100 paid staff and hundreds of volunteers treating some 3,000 people a year. Victims were of every description – survivors of genocide, victims of trafficking and female genital mutilation and Palestinians driven mad by Israeli occupation strategies.

Luis Muñoz, tortured by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s henchmen, remembers his psychotherapy sessions with Bamber and her staff with gratitude. His wife, a journalist who had written a book about Chile’s rulers, disappeared and he never saw her again. He was 26, she was 23. Muñoz was then thrown into a torture centre, where electrodes were attached to his mouth, ears, eyes, penis, anus and toes. A soldering iron was applied to his testicles. “They didn’t want me dead yet, so they stopped the shock treatment and put me in a wooden box and deprived me of sleep, food and hygiene. There was a little hole for ventilation. They put me in there to drive me mad.”

Muñoz was subsequently transferred to a concentration camp, where he was subjected to mock executions before being allowed – after four years – to move to Britain. Suffering physical pain, depression, panic attacks and guilt, he went to Bamber for therapy: “She knew more about my physical and mental health at the time than I did.

“She was very persistent: when I kept stuff from her she didn’t give up. I thought that if I talked about what happened to me I’d hurt the listener, that it would be too much for her to bear. But Helen could contain me. She enabled me to cry.”

Muñoz became what Bamber defined as a creative survivor. In a multi-layered process, creative survival is in part about allowing people to grieve, to achieve emotional release and begin to put the past behind them.

Soon after returning from Belsen, Helen married Rudi Bamberger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who changed his name to the more British Bamber. Rudi’s father had been beaten to death in Nuremburg on Kristallnacht in November 1938. They divorced after 23 years: Rudi, said Helen, was drowning in his own darkness and ultimately she was unable to cope. They remained friends until he died, but “I was sad for a long time; I think I’m still sad,” she once said.

Therapists at Bamber’s foundation see their own therapists to make sure they are still up to the job. Helen’s therapist used to give her a hard time for over-working. Did she think there was a danger of playing God? “You have to be clear that you have tremendous limitations in this work: you know you’re going to lose some along the line.”

Bamber said Judaism had been important to her, but it didn’t make her a believer. “I don’t have that sense of devotion,” she said. “But I must believe in something. I suspect that it’s believing that even though I see a great deal of evil, there’s something very good to be retrieved from people.”

Helen Bamber is survived by two sons.


Helen Bamber – obituary

Helen Bamber was a campaigner for victims of torture who found her vocation, aged 19, caring for survivors of Belsen

The Telegraph
August 22, 2014

Helen Bamber, who has died aged 89, travelled alone, at the age of 19, to care for survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen; after two years in Germany she returned to Britain where she established her own foundation to care for victims of torture.

Founded in 1985, her Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture is the only British charity that works exclusively with torture victims, helping them to rebuild their lives, and is the largest such organisation in the world. Since its foundation it has dealt with more than 50,000 victims from more than 90 countries around the world, from Kosovo to Sierra Leone and Congo, and from Iraq to Argentina and Sri Lanka.

The daughter of Jews of Polish extraction, she was born Helen Balmuth in north London on May 1 1925. She had a difficult, unhappy childhood. During the 1930s her father, Louis Balmuth, became fixated on the rise of fascism and saw it as his mission to educate his daughter about the threat. He read to her from Hitler’s Mein Kampf at bedtime and made her listen to speeches by Goebbels on the radio, to show her how easily language and public opinion could be manipulated. “I was well aware that we would be annihilated,” she recalled. “By the time I was 10 I knew it all.”

Her fun-loving mother, Marie, had been forced into an arranged marriage and was disappointed by life and by her husband. The family was often broke, and Helen, a sickly child who suffered repeated bouts of bronchitis, often took refuge in her bedroom to avoid her parents’ violent quarrels. On one occasion she recalled coming home and, finding that her parents were out, fantasised that they might be dead.

In her late teens Helen found work as a secretary and administrator to the National Association of Mental Health, which treated returning soldiers and airmen. There she gained considerable insight into trauma, and in 1945 she defied her mother and volunteered for the Jewish Relief Unit, a small group of health and other professionals sent under the auspices of the UN to work with Holocaust survivors. After some rudimentary training, she was made personal assistant to the director of the JRU and dispatched to Belsen.

By the time she arrived, the main camp had been razed and the 12,000 survivors had been moved into a nearby barracks, where Helen and her colleagues were put in charge of distributing food and clothing. Many inmates had died from typhus, and she recalled the dank smell that pervaded the camp, “like the sweet smell of geraniums if you crush them”.

At first she felt useless in the face of so much suffering, but gradually she realised that, while she could not change the past, she could at least listen. “People wanted to tell their story and I was able to receive it,” she told an interviewer from The Observer in 2008. “They would hold me and dig their fingers in and rasp this story out… They would rock back and forth and I would say to them, ‘I will tell your story. Your story will not die.’ It took me a long time to realise that that was all I could do.”

When Belsen had first been liberated by the British Army, there was an outpouring of horror and compassion. But most survivors had nowhere to go. Those who tried to return to the homes they had left were met with hostility by local people who had moved in. Nor were they welcome as refugees. Many remained in Belsen until 1950, and sometimes their anger and frustration spilt over into attacks on relief workers. As a result they became seen as a nuisance by the military authorities in control of the camp: “They changed from being creatures for compassion to being irritating people — displaced persons who had nowhere to go,” Helen Bamber recalled. “And that I found very frightening as a young person, watching those attitudes change.”

After two-and-a-half years at Belsen, Helen returned to Britain, which was then beginning to admit the first child survivors of the concentration camps. She began to work as a counsellor to the children, recalling “their stony little faces, giving nothing back, their sceptical eyes — a complete lack of trust”. She found that she could get through to them by persuading them to reconnect with good memories of earlier childhood. She would get them to draw or paint, and ask them about the games they had played with their parents and the food they had enjoyed.

A harder task was to find schools or employers willing to take them on in a post-war Britain which was preoccupied with its own problems. On one occasion she was interviewed by a headmaster who asked her in all innocence: “Didn’t they give them any books to read in those camps?”

Soon after returning from Belsen, Helen married Rudi Bamberger, a German-Jewish refugee who changed his name to the more “British” Bamber. In 1950, looking for a more settled life, she began working as a hospital administrator at St George’s in Wapping.

While she continued to hold down a series of jobs — as an almoner (social worker) at Middlesex Hospital, administrator at the Middlesex and personal assistant to the orthopaedic surgeon Sir Herbert Seddon — she could not forget her experiences of dealing with victims of the Nazis. In 1958, horrified by accounts of the use of torture by the French in Algeria, she joined Amnesty International, the organisation which publicises the plight of prisoners of conscience.

Over the next three decades she became one of Amnesty’s most passionate volunteers. She helped to set up a medical section, with a group of specialists prepared to examine asylum-seekers claiming to be torture victims, documenting their experiences and lobbying against regimes which condoned experiments on patients in prison hospitals.

She began her Foundation in 1985, initially with a grant from the UN Voluntary Fund, operating out of two rooms in an abandoned hospital in north London with one part-time assistant and a typewriter. From these small beginnings it grew into a centre staffed by more than 100 professionals, full-time and volunteer, treating more than 2,500 survivors a year.

Among those she counselled were a group of septuagenarian former prisoners of the Japanese. The ex-PoWs were rural Northumbrians to whom she was introduced by one of their number, Eric Lomax, in a Northumberland pub. They were initially wary of the stranger from London until she began talking about her own experiences in Belsen, and they began to open up. Later she would advise Colin Firth on his depiction of Lomax’s character in The Railway Man (2013), the film based on his bestselling autobiography of the same name.


Helen Bamber (centre) with former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (left) and Emma Thompson. Photo by PA

In June 1993, though Jewish, Helen Bamber went to Israel and testified on behalf of a Palestinian prisoner who had confessed under torture by the Israeli security forces to being a member of Hamas. Her testimony led to the most serious charges against the man being dropped — one of very few successful challenges to confession evidence in the tens of thousands of cases heard during the Intifada.

Helen Bamber stepped down as director of her Foundation in 2002 to concentrate on her work with patients. In 2005 she set up the Helen Bamber Foundation, to expand her work with torture survivors to include those who had suffered other forms of human rights violations, such as human trafficking and gender-based violence.

A biography of her by Neil Belton, The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty, was published in 1999. She was named European Woman of Achievement in 1993 and appointed OBE in 1997.
Helen Bamber acknowledged the irony that, even though she had helped thousands of victims of torture, the one person she had not been able to help was her own husband. As a child he had seen his father beaten to death by German storm troopers; his mother had perished with most of his family in the camps.

He was so deeply scarred by his own past that he found it difficult to relate to his wife’s comparatively fortunate upbringing, and they found it impossible to discuss the Holocaust. They divorced in 1970, though they remained friends until he died. The thought of her inability to help him continued to move Helen Bamber to tears.

Their two sons survive her.

Helen Bamber, born May 1 1925, died August 21 2014


Helen Bamber obituary

Tireless campaigner for human rights who fought for the victims of torture and cruelty

The Guardian,
August 24/25 2014

Helen Bamber, who has died aged 89, was renowned for her lifetime pursuit of human rights for those who faced the worst kinds of inhumanity. She worked with people who had suffered torture, trafficking, slavery, the effects of war and other forms of extreme cruelty. Over almost 70 years, she helped tens of thousands to confront the horror and brutality of their experiences. It was her belief that through restoring dignity to those who have suffered atrocity, we find dignity and humanity in ourselves.

She was born Helen Balmuth to a Polish-Jewish family in north London, the only child of Louis, an accountant, and Marie, a singer. Strong beliefs in human rights pervaded the household. Her father taught her about the threat of Nazism at an early age, reading to her from Mein Kampf and translating Nazi speeches demonstrating how language could be manipulated and, with it, public opinion.

In 1945, Helen responded to a call for volunteers to help survivors of the concentration camps set up by the Nazis. At the age of 20, she joined the Jewish Relief Unit under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to enter the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she worked for two years. She said:

There was nothing at times that I could do for the survivors, other than to listen and to bear witness to the rasping out of their story. Many were to die, but all I could say was, ‘Your story will be told, I will be your witness.’

Bearing witness and refusing to be a bystander remained themes throughout her life’s work.

On her return to Britain in 1947, Helen was appointed to the Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration Camps and became responsible for 722 orphaned children who had survived Auschwitz. In the same year, she married Rudi Bamberger, a German Jewish refugee, who later anglicised his name to Bamber. The couple had two sons, Jonathan (now a geologist) and David (now an organisational change consultant), who survive her.

Helen joined Amnesty International shortly after its inception in 1961. She chaired the British section’s first medical group, which developed a systematic approach to documenting the physical and psychological injuries arising from state-sponsored torture around the world. She found that documenting injuries alone was not enough and that survivors of human rights abuses and their families were also in desperate need of support to overcome what had happened to them. Helen began providing therapy, alongside a team of doctors, to deal with the aftermath of trauma, during which people become haunted, unable to trust others and debilitated by flashbacks and nightmares. In Latin America, she worked with the “disappeared” and tortured in Chile, Argentina and Nicaragua. Perico Rodriguez, a torture survivor from Argentina who was helped by Helen in the 1970s remembers “her determination to help everybody. And I really mean everybody, not just those ‘deserving’ of help, but everybody who needed help.”

In 1985, Helen founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now known as Freedom From Torture) in response to a call from British doctors who said they did not have time to deal with the complexities of torture survivors coming to the UK or “to listen to their silences”.

Here, she pioneered a treatment approach aimed at achieving what she termed “creative survival”. It was her view that therapy in isolation was not sufficient. If a person’s recovery following atrocity was to be sustained, then it was necessary for that person also to feel safe. She combined legal protection and the prevention of social deprivation with therapy and rehabilitation as the cornerstones of care for those whose lives had been shattered. As she put it:

One cannot give therapy if a person does not feel safe, if there is no food or a roof over your head. The rehabilitative aim is centred on the purpose of freeing victims from a form of bondage through which the torturer ensures that his interventions will last over time.

Simple, yet profound. Her approach is still considered ahead of its time.

Helen remained at the helm of the medical foundation for almost 20 years. In 2005, relentless and tireless even at 80, in response to changing patterns of global violence and an increasingly hostile political landscape, she and Michael Korzinski founded the Helen Bamber Foundation. The new foundation had a broader remit and included not only torture survivors, but those who had suffered other forms of human rights violations, including those brutalised by criminal gangs, trafficked for labour or sexual exploitation or kept as slaves by profiteers or families, who often sought international protection but continued to be dehumanised as liars, cheats or asylum seekers.

As the culmination of her life’s work, at the Helen Bamber Foundation, it was her intention to hand over to others the knowledge accumulated over many years. She created a team to share her vision of compassion for those “whose voices are taken away twice – first by the perpetrator, and then by those decision makers whose language denies the experience of atrocity and loss, thereby colluding with the very intention of the perpetrator to destroy the truth of that person”.

Helen’s ability to speak truth to power and represent those who she considered the most marginalised was a rare and inspiring quality that earned her great respect. The former president of the European court of human rights, Sir Nicolas Bratza, described her as “a formidable force of nature who earned and commanded the respect of all who had the good fortune to meet her”. The actor Juliet Stevenson has stated that “Helen’s capacity to speak from the heart while reasoning with her laser-like intelligence and clarity of purpose made her a phenomenal advocate”. Sir Geoffrey Bindman, lawyer and specialist in human rights, said: “She ranks high among the outstanding humanitarians of our time.”

In recognition of her work, Helen was named European Woman of Achievement in 1993, made an OBE in 1997, and received the inaugural Times/Sternberg Active Life award in 2008 for continuing to “assert the questing spirit of humanity”. She held honorary degrees from Oxford, Dundee, Glasgow, Essex, Ulster, Kingston and Oxford Brookes universities.

The actor Colin Firth, whom Helen helped to prepare for his role of the torture survivor Eric Lomax in the 2013 film The Railway Man, said: “I marvelled that anyone could find the strength to engage with so many desperate stories without being engulfed by them.” Lomax himself wrote: “Meeting with [Helen] was like walking through a door into an unexplored world, of caring and special understanding.”

• Helen Bamber, human rights campaigner, born 1 May 1925; died 21 August 2014


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