Portia, in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, says, “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” This metaphor holds true in the case of an elderly female David who fought a Goliath. Battling injustice until her eighth decade, this woman could not stop while there were still dragons to slay.
Parents read to their children to instill the love of books, to entertain, to bond. In Helen Balmuth’s case, the tales did not end with a happily-ever-after. She was the daughter of Louis, a father who had endured pogrom-ridden Poland; though he immigrated to Britain at age nine, anti-Semitism had left an imprint on his soul. In his late thirties, in an arranged wedding, he married Marie Bader, the daughter of Polish parents. Their union was unhappy, as Marie was disappointed by her acrimonious spouse and their poverty. While she hoped Helen would fulfill her own aborted dream and become a socialite, Louis instilled in his only child a sense of social activism. As World War II ravaged Europe, he religiously listened to broadcasts by Goebbels and read excerpts from Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), explaining that the book was a blueprint for their genocide. Home in the working-class neighborhood of Amhurst Park, filled with a sense of impending doom, instilled in the little girl a feeling of insecurity. Helen, a sickly child (probably due to a bout of tuberculosis), secluded herself in her room to dodge her parents’ violent quarrels. On one occasion, Helen came home and, discovering her mother and father had gone out, fantasized that they were dead. The only ray of light came from her beloved Aunt Mina, who dyed her hair platinum, sported ritzy homemade clothes, and had a boyfriend and spares. She perished in the Café de Paris during the Blitz of 1941. Following the tragedy, a panic-stricken Louis evacuated his family to the countryside. Helen recalled, “I was well aware that we would be annihilated. By the time I was ten, I knew it all.”
In her late teens, Helen worked as a secretary for the National Association of Mental Health, which treated veterans, and in 1945, she defied her mother and volunteered for the Jewish Relief Unit sent by the UN to work with Holocaust survivors. The nineteen-year-old trekked across a new European landscape, where forty million people were adrift. Her training had entailed dealing with misery, but nothing prepared her for the “gray ghosts at the doorway of the world,” as one of her fellow workers described the displaced. They ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where more than fifty thousand people―including Anne Frank and her sister Margot―had died, and where the British liberators discovered thirteen thousand corpses. Relief workers distributed food and clothing to twelve thousand survivors housed in nearby barracks. Many of the victims had perished from typhus, and Helen forever remembered the cloying smell that pervaded the unhallowed ground. As she stared at the result of the inhumanity man had inflicted on man, she saw the world as divided into two camps: bystanders and witnesses. At first, she felt helpless in the face of a tsunami of suffering, but gradually realized that, though she could not change the survivors’ reality, she could listen. Helen explained, “People wanted to tell their story and I was able to receive it. 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 realize that that was all I could do.” The eighteen months she spent in Germany would shape the rest of Helen’s life; she would never be a bystander.
Shortly after her return to Britain, Helen attended a New Year’s Eve party where she met Rudi Bamberger, who had anglicized his name to the more British-sounding Bamber, and she moved with him to a condemned apartment. His mother had met her end in a concentration camp, and Nazis had beaten his father to death in Nuremberg on Kristallnacht. Rudi had survived the war, yet could not escape his demons. Although they loved one another, their marriage soon developed fissures. Like her father, Rudi was a pessimist, drowning in his own darkness, and Helen, not wanting the same lot in life as her mother, divorced him after twenty-three years. She explained that living with victims is a very different matter from working with them, and added that it would have been easier if they had simply not liked each other. They remained friends until he died, but “I was sad for a long time; I think I’m still sad.”
Life was tough after they split up, and Helen worked to support her sons, Jonathan and David. However, in some ways, the marital breakdown was liberating. She rented out rooms to foreign students who filled the house with laughter, something that had not existed in her parents’ home or the one she had shared with Rudi. Helen stated that she had always felt sorry for her parents and was determined that would not be how people viewed her.
After meeting Anna Freud, she worked with the Jewish Refugee Committee and helped look after the more than seven hundred orphans who had been at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In her role as a counselor, she recalled “their stony little faces, giving nothing back, their skeptical eyes―a complete lack of trust.’’ Helen found she could establish a connection by persuading them to reconnect with their pre-war memories. A harder task was to find schools willing to take the youngsters on in a post-war Britain preoccupied with its own problems. Mrs. Bamber remembered a promising young refugee who applied to an elite school, but, understandably, was deficient in academics. One headmaster scoffed, “Didn’t they give them any books to read in those camps?”
Horrified by accounts of the use of torture by the French in Algeria, Bamber joined Amnesty International, an organization formed in 1961 to publicize the plight of prisoners of conscience, and rose to be chairwoman of the British branch. In Latin America, she worked with the “disappeared’’ and tortured in Chile, Argentina, and Nicaragua. Over the next three decades, like the fictional Tom Joad, wherever there was an injustice, Helen was there.
She and others left Amnesty International to branch out on their own, and at age sixty, a time when most people are slowing down, Mrs. Bamber established the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom from Torture). They wanted to go beyond documenting abuses to treating them, using many of the methods she had learned at Bergen-Belsen. A grant from the United Nations Voluntary Fund provided initial funds, and the Foundation operated out of two rooms at the National Temperance Hospital in London, where she had one part-time assistant and a typewriter. She draped a cloth over the single mirror because many of her patients were too damaged to bear their reflections. From this humble inception, the center grew to a staff of more than 100 professions dealing with more than fifty thousand people from more than ninety countries, including Bosnia, Chile, Congo, Iran, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. In her quest to bring succor, Helen travelled to many of these geographical landmines. Most visitors were taken aback by the Center’s ministering angel; she stood four feet ten inches and compensated with towering heels; she sported permed hair, nail polish, and scarlet lipstick. Somehow, despite her advanced age and hard life, the light in her eyes remained undiminished. Anne Frank’s words were true to Helen’s spirit: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.’’
In 1993, approaching her seventies, Mrs. Bamber took on an excruciatingly painful task when she went to Israel and testified on behalf of a Palestinian prisoner who had confessed, under torture by the Israeli security forces, of being a member of Hamas. In her attempt to understand his pain, she sat for an hour wearing a hood like the one officers had put over prisoners’ heads during interrogations. She said she gagged and felt a rising sense of panic. The experience was Bamber’s variation of Sophie’s Choice: to accuse Israel, the state founded by her fellow Jews, of torture. Afterward, a man came up to her and spat out his contempt: “With friends like you, who needs enemies?” Although accused of being a Judas, she felt she had to confront injustice, regardless of the perpetrator.
Helen remained at the helm of the organization for almost twenty years. In 2005, tireless at eighty, she and Michael Korzinski began the Helen Bamber Foundation. It included not only torture survivors, but also those who had suffered other forms of human right violations, including those brutalized by criminal gangs, trafficked for work or sex, or used as slaves. Through a holistic combination of medicine and psychological, social, and physical therapies, Bamber’s organization helped torture victims recover from unspeakable horrors: electric shocks to genitals, beatings on the bottoms of the feet, nonlethal hangings. At age eighty-three, Mrs. Bamber continued to work every morning, including weekends, the time when she met the most psychologically traumatized people.
The efforts of the diminutive woman who cast a giant shadow garnered recognition and 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.’’ Mrs. Bamber advised Colin Firth on his role in The Railway Man, a 2013 movie based on the British soldier Eric Lomax, who was captured by the Japanese during World War II and forced to work on the Thai-Burma railway, known as the “death railway” because of the thousands of prisoners who perished during its construction. Firth said that, even in old age and ill health, Helen continued to be determined to do all she could to help those affected by evil. Lomax became a client of the medical foundation in the late 1980s and called Helen a pivotal figure in his late-in-life rehabilitation. In 1993, Helen was honored with the European Women of Achievement Award, and in 1997, she was admitted to the Order of the British Empire. She held honorary degrees from Oxford, Glasgow, Ulster, and several other universities.
Despite the accolades, a miasma of self-reproof lingered, stemming from the sorrow that, though she saved thousands, she could not save her relationship with Rudi. In addition to this heartache, Helen had a complicated relationship with her sons, who harbored a sense of resentment that she had been more motherly to thousands of the dispossessed than she had been to them. Helen lived alone in an apartment where few visited; she had spent her life in the pursuit of justice at the expense of cultivating personal relationships. Most evenings were spent at her foundation and ended with her team gathering in her office for a bottle of wine. Often, they dropped by the local Thai restaurant, where the owners always brought a cushion for her to sit on. “Sometimes,” she said, “we go mad and try Greek.”
In Neil Belton’s 2012 biography The Good Listener, the author described how Helen, the consummate humanitarian, kept geraniums in pots on the terrace of her London apartment. When she crushed their petals, she remembered, in Proustian fashion, the cloying scent of death in Belsen. She explained that she did so because of “the need to forget, the wish to remember.’’