Helen Rae Bamber OBE, née Helen Balmuth (1 May 1925 – 21 August 2014), was a British psychotherapist and human rights activist. She worked with Holocaust survivors in Germany after the concentration camps were liberated in 1945. 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. In 2005, she created the Helen Bamber Foundation to help survivors of human rights violations.
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. She worked in many countries including Gaza, Kosovo, Uganda, Turkey and Northern Ireland.
Family and early life
Bamber's father, Louis Balmuth, was born in New York. His family returned to Poland, at a time of Jewish pogroms and moved again to England in 1895 when Balmuth was nine. He was in his late 30s when he married Marie Bader, who had been born in Britain of Polish extraction. Their daughter Helen Balmuth (later, Bamber) was born in 1925, and grew up in Amhurst Park, a Jewish area of North-East London. Louis Balmuth worked as an accountant during the day and as a philosopher, writer and mathematician outside office hours. His wife Marie was a singer and pianist who hoped that their daughter would become a celebrated performer. When Louis's younger brother Michael, who had been financially successful and with whom the entire Balmuth family, including Louis and Michael's parents, lived in Michael's large house, fell on hard financial times, Bamber and her parents moved to a smaller home in nearby Stamford Hill. Bamber was moved from a private Jewish school in London to a multi-denominational primary, from where she won a scholarship to high school in Tottenham. She had spent much time sick as a child and may well have suffered from tuberculosis.
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. During World War II, Bamber was evacuated to Suffolk. 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. Menachem Bader would later be involved in the 1944 'blood for goods' negotiations with the SS in an attempt to save Hungarian Jews.
Career
Belsen
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. At the age of 20, she was appointed to one of the first rehabilitation teams to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with the Jewish Relief Unit to help with the physical and psychological recovery of many of that camp's 20,000 Holocaust survivors. She says: "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 succeeded in invading England, we would have been the victims." Henry Lunzer, her manager in the Jewish Relief Unit, remembers her as a vivacious girl and a natural organiser. "Helen just took charge of [London] headquarters, administered the whole thing," says Lunzer. "It was amazing at that age. God only knows what made her so efficient!"