An article on an inspirational woman...

From the Guardian

The Guardian Profile: Helen Bamber

Small wonder

As a teenager, she volunteered to help concentration camp survivors and the experience changed her life. Today she works with victims of torture and helps them overcome unimaginable horrors. Simon Hattenstone on the tireless compassion of an 'ordinary woman with extraordinary talents'

Saturday 11 March 2000

In 1945 Helen Bamber made the decision that was to shape her life. She was 19 years old, still a girl, when she told her parents that she was going to Belsen with the Jewish Relief Unit. She didn't quite know why she felt compelled to see, to smell, to understand the dreadful aftermath of Nazism, but she knew she had to. It was in Germany that Bamber decided the world was divided into two camps: bystanders and witnesses. Bystanders see what they want, turn away when it suits them, deny the evidence if necessary. Witnesses have a duty to observe and report truthfully.

Now, 55 years on, Bamber still divides the world into bystanders and witnesses. As founder and director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, she has borne witness to myriad horror stories. At the foundation, she works as a psychotherapist, listening to clients for as long as they wish or can bear to talk. And when she's not listening, she is tending the foundation's ever expanding bureaucracy or travelling the world to discover the most repugnant details of the world's most oppressive regimes. The title of Neil Belton's recent biography of her, The Good Listener (Phoenix, £7.99), is a perfect summation of her life and work: understated, to the point, practical - rather like the foundation itself.

"Helen is not an extraordinary person in many respects," says Sherman Carroll, her director of public affairs at the foundation. "She's not an intellectual, she's not terribly well educated with a fancy degree, she's not a lawyer, not a doctor. She's an ordinary woman who has committed her life to good works. So in that sense she's amazing ... but ordinary."

John McCarthy, the broadcaster and former hostage, remembers being as intrigued as he was impressed the first time he met her. "She's tiny. She'll come to slightly above your waist," he says. "Yet as you talk to her you realise there's a great deal of not just energy but power. She is an interesting mix - so caring and compassionate, but also direct and determined."

When you enter the foundation you walk past a room full of disparate people, of all colours and nationalities. Many faces are marked with the lines and scars of struggle. One woman is laughing with a friend; one man holds the weight of his head - the world - in his hands; a couple of children run about the waiting room. You can't help wondering about their history. Where are they from? How did they offend their home state? Were they psychologically tortured, starved, beaten, locked in solitary? Can they ever be happy again?

Helen Bamber, 74, seems even tinier than John McCarthy suggests. She's wearing a glistening white shirt that is buried inside a smart blue cardigan which trails down to her ankles. Her lips are glossed, her nails varnished in a transparent silver. Any number of bracelets dance up her arms. The foundation has just heard that General Pinochet will be returned to Chile, and she can't hide her despondency. She questions the value of the British medical reports and says she would be happy if the Chilean authorities disregarded them .

She speaks softly and slowly, slightly pedantically. It's a lovely voice - ebbing and flowing, massaging. She gestures emphatically as she talks, and when this is pointed out she is a little embarrassed and defensive. "So many of my clients put their hand on their heart when they want to express something. It's a language of the body."

A conversation with Bamber soon turns to Belsen. She talks about how inexperienced she was, how she had to learn quickly. "I realised after a time that I couldn't take away their suffering, or their images or their losses, or their terrible sense of unresolved grief. People would tell you their story and it would spill out like a kind of vomit. They would go on talking, talking, talking ..." You can hear their despair in her voice. "And what they were telling you was sometimes quite dreadful. After a while I began to realise the most important role for me there was to bear witness. Bearing witness to the vulnerability of humanity."

She stops herself. "It sounds a very pompous phrase doesn't it? But the evil that can be done to human beings is something that I suppose has dominated my life."

Did her parents support her when she went to Germany? "My father accepted it, almost with a shrug of resignation. I think it was something about repaying a debt. I was aware that if the Nazis had succceeded in invading England, we would have been the victims."

Bamber grew up with a sense of persecution. Her father, Louis Balmuth, was born in New York, but his family returned to the Poland of the pogroms before emigrating to England in 1895 when he was nine. He was in his late 30s when he married Marie Bader, who had been born in Britain of Polish extraction. Bamber's first memories are of a huge house in north London's Amhurst Park that she shared with her extended family, a "splendid house" with its own billiards room.

Louis was an accountant by day and a philosopher/scribbler/ mathematician by night. Marie was a singer and pianist who hoped that Helen would realise the dreams she had had for herself and become a celebrated performer. The house was owned by the mysterious Uncle Michael, who had made a fortune as a "merchant", though what he sold no one seemed to know. The Balmuths were clever, multilingual and argumentative, and unsympathetic to the ways and needs of children. Before long, the Depression swallowed up Michael's money, and Helen and her parents found themselves relegated to a much smaller home in nearby Stamford Hill.

Fascism and its attendant fears were a backdrop to daily life. An educated pessimist, Louis Balmuth seemed to regard extermination as an inevitability. As the second world war scoured Europe, he listened to broadcasts by Goebbels, read young Helen extracts from Hitler's treatise Mein Kampf, and told her exactly what the Nazi leader was doing and where it would all end. Balmuth lived petrified by the past and in fear of the future.

Bamber had initially been sent to a private Jewish school in London. But when her parents began to struggle financially she was switched to a multi-denominational primary, from where she won a scholarship to high school in Tottenham. This is where a teacher bawled her out for not knowing the second verse of the national anthem and told her that of all parents, the parents of Jewish children had a particular duty to make sure their children knew the anthem.

She says her real education happened at home in early childhood. Bamber was a sick girl who spent much of her childhood bedridden with an illness that was probably TB. Relatives and refugee friends of her parents used to visit her, talk to her as if she were an adult and deliver bedside chats that could go on for days. She recalls a man who sat by her side explaining the first world war, and how the punitive settlement led to the rise of Hitler.

Bamber didn't go to Belsen with a sense of mission, but with foreboding. "I felt I had to face something, the fear in myself. I had to understand other people's fear, and I had to understand something about overcoming fear_ living. How does one live with the knowledge of atrocity?"

Henry Lunzer, her boss in the Jewish Relief Unit, still thinks of her as a "lovely, vivacious little girl". She was also a natural organiser. "Helen just took charge of headquarters, administered the whole thing," says Lunzer. "It was amazing at that age. God only knows what made her so efficient!" When we talk about Lunzer, Bamber smiles abstractedly. He was "quite a guy", she says, "looked very handsome in uniform, but then everyone looked good in uniform". She pulls herself up abruptly: "That's a stupid thing to say."

Bamber founded the the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in 1985. She had spent three decades campaigning for the human rights organisation Amnesty International, where she had started a group to help torture victims. Amnesty leaders decided that treating torture victims as well as campaigning against the regimes that abused them was too broad a remit, which spurred her to start the foundation. Today there are 85 paid staff and 110 volunteers.

Although never formally trained, Bamber says she has no qualms about calling herself a psychotherapist - she has earned the title, having trained on the job for most of her life. Sheila Melzak, head of child and adolescent psychotherapy, at the foundation says she doesn't know how Bamber does it, but somehow people just open up to her. "She's very moth erly, maternal, but not in a pampering way. All sorts of people feel safe with her, especially those who have missed out on parenting. They'll talk to her about the most private experiences." She says no level of training could equip someone with this skill, and suggests that it is down to Bamber's own childhood experiences.

"I do think it's because of her own lack of parenting in her childhood. Her father was passionate about human rights. Fixated. So she was taught from a very early age about repression and about how other people may challenge that. But as parents they were not particularly good at parenting."

Bamber believes torture is a political act, but she says she must be careful here - the foundation is a charity, and it is important for it not to be perceived as politically motivated. "For me, torture is about total helplessness and total power, the deliberate destruction of people. It often can be at the instigation of the government, carried out by their henchmen. It is about the destruction of human beings, often while keeping them alive. Torture has been described as the attempt to kill a person without their dying."

The foundation exists to help people like Luis Muñoz who was tortured by Pinochet's henchmen. In 1974 his wife, a journalist who had written a book about Chile's ruling class, disappeared and he never saw her again. He was 26, she was 23. Muñoz was then thrown into a torture centre. He was beaten, kicked, forced to hang by his arms. His torturers attached electrodes to his mouth, his ears his eyes, his penis, his anus and his toes. They applied a soldering iron to his testicles. "They thought I was going to die, but 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."

After three months in the torture centre, he was put in solitary confinement for another couple of months before being transferred to a concentration camp. On the way, the guards tormented him with a mock execution. Muñoz pleaded with them to kill him. "I thought I'd be better off dead, I'd given up."

When he arrived in Britain in 1977 he suffered depression, panic attacks and guilt, in addition to considerable physical pain. He first met Bamber when he and fellow Chilean refugees were on a 16-day hunger strike protesting against Pinochet. He discovered that Bamber, like him, lived in London's Muswell Hill, and after that they kept bumping into each other on the 43 bus. "She was very concerned about me. She knew more about my physical and mental health than I did at the time." Bamber told him he looked terrible, broken, that he needed help. "She doesn't let go. You can't evade her. She's very persistent. If you keep stuff from her, she won't give up."

He started going to Bamber for therapy. "For a long time I thought that if you talk about what happened to you, you'll hurt the person; you think it's too much for anyone else to bear. But Helen can contain you. She enables you to cry."

Luis Muñoz is what Bamber would call a creative survivor. She says there is so much rubbish talked about survivors and victims, as if survival itself is enough. But people have to be shown how to live again. She cites the strongest she found at Belsen - those who formed political committees, held religious meetings, started a theatre, forced themselves into being more than helpless victims. In a strange way the culture that grew out of concentration camps like Belsen become a template for the foundation. It is not simply a clinic where victims come to unveil themselves of their histories, but a cultural centre with allotments, holiday clubs, chess groups and drawing classes.

Creative survival is also about allowing people to grieve. Bamber talks about the Jews who came to Britain after the Holocaust and found themselves in a new world where they had to put their past behind them because it was not acknowledged, a world where they had to make do and get on. Many Jewish people did get on, but without an emotional release some imploded.

"That is something I feel so strongly about here. How do you retrieve their memory of somebody so you can bury them in an appropriate way, and not be fixed on their grotesque way of dying? I think many of us have found ways of sitting with people and retrieving that young man or woman by talking about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the way they smoked, and their irritating ways. You can bring the person back as they were in the best of memories, and you then see it's time to bury them." She apologises for her bluntness.

Soon after returning from Belsen she married Rudi Bamberger, who changed his named to the more British Bamber. He had escaped from Germany and the thugs who destroyed his parents' house and beat his father to death with fists and truncheons. There was tenderness and love in their relationship, but it was doomed. Like her father, Rudi was a terminal pessimist. He was drowning in his own darkness, and Bamber couldn't cope. Although her father had been more articulate about his helplessness, they shared the same quietness, the sense of having withdrawn from life. Living with victims is a very different matter to working with them, says Bamber. They divorced after 23 years together.

"It's not that one doesn't have affections or love, but very often somebody who has survived becomes disassociated from themselves as well as other people." She is almost whispering. "That was quite hard to live with - someone who was cut off from communication. You couldn't have spontaneity or celebration."

She says it would have been easier to divorce if they had simply not liked each other. "I was very sad for a long time. I think I'm still very sad." For many years she has lived by herself in Muswell Hill. Life was tough after they split up. She worked as a medical secretary at St George's hospital in east London, but was always broke. Their two sons Jonathan (now a physicist), and David (a sculptor whose work often alludes to the Holocaust), attended separate schools, she didn't have a car, the house they lived in was condemned.

John Rundle, a doctor who has known Bamber for 30 years and now works at the foundation, thinks struggle has made her what she is today. "If you're capable of dealing with the sorts of people we get here I don't think you could come from a jolly-hockey-sticks, wonderfully protective background. Helen has been fighting adversity ever since she was at Belsen. I don't think life has left her much room for personal comforts."

In some ways the breakdown of her marriage was liberating. Because she was short of money she rented rooms to foreign students. Suddenly her morose, dilapidated home was transformed by youth and optimism. "I suppose I began to laugh a lot when they were around. We had fun, we danced, we cooked, I used to book the entire launderette on a Sunday afternoon. There were six or seven students at a time, every nationality under the sun, and there would be great battles or debates about the virtues of eating rhinoceros. There hadn't been much laughter in my parents' home or in my married life."

Bamber has a lovely girlish giggle, and can extract humour from the grimmest situations. She says the ability to laugh is terribly important, especially in someone so prone to crying. Does she cry at work? "No. I can listen to the most appalling stories that people tell me, I can bear it." She says the one thing she can't cope with is hearing people sing. "We used to hold a music group downstairs. And sometimes there would be singing, and this I could hardly bear. We had a terribly sad woman from Iran who used to sit there and do very little, and then she sang, and I had to leave the room. There's something about the human voice; seeing what capacity people have for creativity and what's denied them. Perhaps it's about what people might be if left alone."

Bamber has a famously tough exterior - the woman who gets things done. When asked for five words to describe his mother, Jonathan Bamber chooses: "Driven, focused, dedicated, slightly obsessive . . . She has an unimaginable amount of energy, disappearing off to Uganda, to Kosovo, to the West Bank, all of the most horrible, devastated places in the world. I am exactly half her age and I would struggle to maintain that schedule." Bamber is quietly proud of what she is achieving at her age. She mentions a few times that she will be 75 in May.

Monday to Friday she deals with the bureaucracy, at the weekend she sees clients. Her biographer Neil Belton says: "She works harder than anybody else at the foundation. She is obsessive. It can drive people mad." Sheila Melzak says that she is finally learning to let go a bit, to delegate, though she's still reluctant to cede control. . "But recently, more and more, I've seen she can have fun."

Bamber says she understands why she puts up a tough front, but doesn't like it. She talks about how she felt sorry for her parents, their sense of failure and unhappiness, and how she never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her. "I wanted to see myself as a very strong person not showing vulnerability, and I don't think this is helpful to people. It can be very irritating, to put it mildly. I get irritated with myself, so it's not surprising others do."

John Rundle says she is much more vulnerable than she lets on. "I think there are times when she is very upset by the intolerable experiences people go through." It has been suggested there is a masochistic streak in Bamber that forces her to go on, but Rundle disagrees. "I don't think it's obsessional or pathological. I think it's that she's been challenged. She knows the evil of mankind, and she won't put up with it. It's a crusade if you like. But it's not done as a zealot, it's done as a human being."

While much of Bamber's early middle age was devoted to the domestic, bringing up Jonathan and David, she also managed to hold down a series of demanding jobs - acting almoner (social worker) at Middlesex Hospital, administrator at the Middlesex and personal assistant to the brilliant orthopaedic surgeon Sir Herbert Seddon. For many years she couldn't see a pattern to her life. It's only recently that she has begun to realise it has all been of a piece - from her father; to Belsen; to Rudi, her husband; to Amnesty; to the foundation.

There was also her work with Dr Maurice Pappworth, a much-loved and vilified campaigner against the abuses that go on in the name of medical experimentation. Bamber met Pappworth at St George's where he was a consultant. Bamber would help him with his administration, and they would talk in his rooms for hours about the overuse of drugs, unnecessary surgery, the Nazi doctors' malign experimentation. Bamber says Pappworth educated her about medical ethics. "He was as preoccupied as I was with this question of total power, total helplessness." Together they compiled an archive of abuses. John Rundle, who was taught by Pappworth, describes him as the greatest doctor he met. "Like a lot of very clever people he was succinct and simple because he grasped all the underlying principles, and Helen's very much the same. She tends to be a person of few words, straight to the point."

Bamber is fidgeting again, desperate to get back to work. "It's like sitting here when Rome is burning." The therapists at the foundation see their own therapists, or supervisors, to make sure they are still up to the job. Her supervisor gives her a hard time for over-working. Is she right? "I don't think I'm terribly good at taking care of myself." Perhaps work is her way of looking after herself? "I think it is. I think it gives me a lot of hope, a lot of personal help. I get a lot back from the people we treat in terms of seeing them grow and develop and overcome."

Neil Belton talks about the paradox of the carer. "You can get a lot of satisfaction from being an omnipotent carer. There's a little bit of God that attaches to it, the way people come to rely on her. She is aware of that element."

Does she think there is a danger of playing God? She doesn't answer directly. "You have to be clear that you have tremendous limitations in this work; you know you're going to lose some along the line."

Belton spent three years writing The Good Listener. He says: "Helen remains an enigma to me. Most activists I've known don't retain the humour and human sympathy she brings to her work, the ability to focus on individuals. There's a side that's just the grimly dedicated campaigner, but another that brings a great deal of joy and light."

Earlier this year, the government introduced its immigration and asylum act, which has resulted in asylum seekers living off vouchers instead of real money while being banned from earning their own. Families have been dispersed across the country. "At least when Jewish people came to Britain after the war, they were allowed to live in communities," says Bamber. "I feel so ashamed of the situation."

John McCarthy says: "She starts from the basic premise of right and wrong. You need a fair degree of anger to do her work." Bamber agrees. She says that anger can be a tremendous creative driving force, that without it none of the world's most pernicious regimes would have been defeated.

In an earlier conversation she had talked about her need for openness, the need to challenge her parents' generations who refused to admit to or share what they had been through. Out of nowhere, she says: "I know that my husband and I did pass on something about the secrecy to our children. I know we did try to protect them from the full knowledge of what had happened, and I don't know that I blame myself for that.

"When one of my sons was very young he asked me whether his grandfather had been shot, and I said 'yes', which was a lie, because he was beaten to death in front of his family. At what age do you say that to a child? I suppose I didn't want them to have the same knowledge that I had when I was growing up" - the knowledge she desperately sought out. Bamber never attempts to reconcile her contradictions.

She offers a cigarette from a dusty box. She likes seeing people smoke, she says: it reminds her of the war. She is stroking the hair of a beautifully dressed soft doll that Chilean clients have made to raise money. She is talking about the disappointments in her life; how this fiercely independent woman had always aspired to Sunday-lunch domesticity. "I never quite pulled it off. I didn't achieve the married life that I wanted, so there have been gaps and loneliness as well, yes."

We talk about how important Judaism has been to her. Yes, she says, but that doesn't make her a believer. "It's very curious because I'm always moved by other people's devotion. But I don't have that sense of devotion. I must believe in something." And for once she's struggling to make sense of herself. Slowly, diffidently the words form. "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."

Life at a glance

Born: London, May 1, 1925.

Education: Down Lanes Central School; part-time social science student, London School of Economics.

Married: 1947 Rudi Bamberger, divorced 1970.

Work: 1945 volunteer on one of first rehabilitation teams to enter Belsen concentration camp; senior case worker, Committee for the care of Children from Concentration Camps (1947-1954); almoner at St George's hospital east London (1956); founder member, National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital (1961); joined Amnesty 1961; founded Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (1985).

Other positions: Advisory board, Gaza Community Mental Health; patron, Women Against Violence, Belfast.

Awards: European Woman of Achievement (1993), in recognition of work with survivors of repression and torture; OBE (1997).