Helen Bamber
In 1947, she returned to Britain and continued her work, helping to establish Amnesty International and later co-founding the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture.
[1] Throughout her life, Bamber worked with those who were the most marginalised: Holocaust survivors, asylum-seekers, refugees, victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland, trafficked men, women and children, survivors of genocide, torture, rape, female genital mutilation, British former Far East prisoners of war, former hostages and other people who suffered torture abroad.
Their daughter Helen Balmuth (later, Bamber) was born in 1925, and grew up in Amhurst Park, a Jewish area of North-East London.
[2] Bamber's grandfather had been a politico who had followed the ideas of Peter Kropotkin and her father's strong beliefs in human rights pervaded the radical household.
The family felt the Nazi threat strongly, and during the 1930s, her father, who spoke fluent German, followed Radio Berlin broadcasts in order to track the unfolding political situation.
He read out sections of Mein Kampf to the family to underline the issues at stake, and Bamber describes a sense of constant foreboding in her home.
As a teenager in the late 1930s, Bamber joined a group of protesters opposing Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.
[2] Her mother's cousins, Chaim and Menachem, were prominent leaders within Hashomer Hatzair, and urged Bamber's parents to send her to live on a Palestinian kibbutz.
[5] Towards the end of the war, Bamber took a job as secretary to a Harley Street doctor, responding to an ad calling for volunteers to help Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.
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.
"[9][10] She described her work by saying, "Sometimes I found it necessary to say to people who I knew were not going to live: 'You are giving me your testimony and I will hold it for you and I will honour it and I will bear witness to what has happened to you.
In 1985 they all left Amnesty and set up Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture in rooms at the National Temperance Hospital in London, moving to Kentish Town two years later.
As the Medical Group had dealt often with people whose injuries needed specialist physical and psychological help, they set out to provide long-term care to patients.
They treated up to 3000 patients a year from over 90 countries, the role of therapist as one of witness – "to receive, not to recoil" and often "simply sit rocking somebody while they tell their story".
HBF provides expert care and support for refugees and asylum seekers who have suffered extreme physical, sexual and psychological violence, abuse and exploitation.
Their clients have been subjected to atrocities including state-sponsored torture, religious / political persecution, human trafficking, forced labour, sexual exploitation, and gender-based violence.
