Helen Bamber facts for kids
Helen Rae Bamber (born Helen Balmuth, May 1, 1925 – August 21, 2014) was a British expert in helping people with their minds (a psychotherapist) and a champion for human rights. She worked with people who survived the Holocaust in Germany after the terrible camps were freed in 1945.
When she came back to Britain in 1947, she kept helping people. She even helped start Amnesty International, a big group that works for human rights. Later, she also helped create the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. In 2005, she started her own group, the Helen Bamber Foundation, to help people who had suffered from human rights abuses.
Throughout her life, Helen Bamber helped those who needed it most. This included Holocaust survivors, people seeking safety in new countries (asylum-seekers and refugees), victims of conflict, people who had been trafficked (forced into work or other situations), and survivors of terrible violence against groups of people (genocide) or extreme cruelty (torture). She also helped British soldiers who were prisoners of war and people who had been held hostage. She worked in many places around the world, like Gaza, Kosovo, Uganda, Turkey, and Northern Ireland.
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Helen Bamber's Early Life and Family
Helen Bamber's father, Louis Balmuth, was born in New York. His family moved back to Poland during a time when Jewish people faced violent attacks called pogroms. They then moved to England in 1895 when Louis was nine. He was nearly 40 when he married Marie Bader, who was born in Britain and had Polish family roots.
Helen Balmuth was born in 1925 and grew up in Amhurst Park, a Jewish area in North-East London. Her father worked as an accountant but also loved philosophy, writing, and math. Her mother, Marie, was a singer and pianist who hoped Helen would become a famous performer.
When Helen was young, her family moved to a smaller home in Stamford Hill. She moved from a private Jewish school to a public school, where she won a scholarship to high school in Tottenham. Helen was often sick as a child and may have had tuberculosis.
Helen's grandfather was interested in politics and human rights. Her father also strongly believed in human rights, and these ideas were important in their home. The family felt the danger from the Nazis very strongly. In the 1930s, her father, who spoke German, listened to Radio Berlin to understand what was happening. He even read parts of Mein Kampf to the family to show them the serious problems. Helen remembered a constant feeling of worry in her home. As a teenager, she joined protests against Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, a group that supported Nazi ideas in Britain.
During World War II, Helen was sent away from London for safety to Suffolk. Her mother's cousins, Chaim and Menachem, were important leaders in a Jewish youth movement called Hashomer Hatzair. They encouraged Helen's parents to send her to live on a kibbutz in Palestine. Menachem Bader later tried to save Hungarian Jews by negotiating with the SS in 1944.
Helen Bamber's Work Helping Others
Helping Survivors at Belsen
Near the end of World War II, Helen Bamber, then 20 years old, saw an advertisement asking for volunteers to help Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. She got a job as a secretary for a doctor and was chosen to be part of one of the first teams to go into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
She went with the Jewish Relief Unit to help the 20,000 survivors of the Holocaust get better, both physically and mentally. Helen said her father accepted her decision, feeling it was important to help. She felt it was about "repaying a debt," knowing that if the Nazis had invaded England, her family would have been victims.
Henry Lunzer, her manager, remembered Helen as a lively and natural organizer. He said, "Helen just took charge of [London] headquarters, administered the whole thing... It was amazing at that age. God only knows what made her so efficient!"
In 2002, Helen shared her experiences at Belsen with the BBC. She arrived a few months after the camp was freed, after the first part of the camp had been burned down because of diseases like typhus. She saw many graves where people had been buried in large numbers. The survivors were living in old, dark, and cold army barracks, many people to a room, with no proper facilities.
She described seeing "awful sights, amputees, gangrene, festering sores." People were still very thin. Sometimes, when searching through things, she would be reminded of the horror, like finding a huge pile of shoes, sorted by size, including children's shoes. She said survivors would hold onto her arms, trying to make her understand the horror. "Above all else, there was a need to tell you everything, over and over and over again. And this was the most significant thing for me, realizing that you had to take it all."
Helen felt her most important role was to "bear witness." This meant listening to people's stories and remembering what happened to them. She said, "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.'" Part of her reason for going to Belsen was to face her own fears and understand how people live after such terrible events. She stayed in Germany for two and a half years, helping a group of young survivors with tuberculosis move to Switzerland.
Returning to England and New Work
In 1947, Helen Bamber came back to England. She worked with the Jewish Refugee Committee and was appointed to a committee that cared for young children from concentration camps. For the next eight years, she trained to work with troubled young adults and children, working closely with the Anna Freud Clinic. During this time, she also studied Social Science part-time at the London School of Economics.
Also in 1947, she married Rudi Bamberger, a German Jewish refugee from Nuremberg. His father had been beaten to death during a night of widespread violence against Jewish people and their property, known as Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938). Rudi changed his last name to 'Bamber'. They had two sons, Jonathan (who became a physicist) and David (who became a sculptor). Helen and Rudi divorced in 1970 after 23 years.
In 1958, Helen Bamber became a social worker (called an Almoner) at St. George in the East End Hospital and later at the Middlesex Hospital. She campaigned for children's rights and became a founding member of the National Association for the Welfare of Children in Hospital. This group helped make it common practice in Britain for mothers to stay with their young children in the hospital.
In 1961, Helen joined the new Amnesty International and became the head of its first British group. In 1974, she helped create the Medical Group within Amnesty International and became its secretary. Because of the Medical Group's work, the British Medical Association started a special group to study torture. Helen led important research into government-sponsored torture in places like Chile, the Soviet Union, South Africa, and Northern Ireland.
The Helen Bamber Foundation
In 2005, when she was 80 years old, Helen Bamber started the Helen Bamber Foundation. She wanted to expand her work helping survivors of torture, especially as global violence changed and political situations became more difficult.
Today, the Helen Bamber Foundation (HBF) still receives more than 800 referrals each year. HBF provides expert care and support for refugees and people seeking asylum who have suffered extreme violence, abuse, and exploitation. Their clients have experienced terrible things like torture by governments, religious or political persecution, human trafficking, forced labor, and gender-based violence.
Because of these experiences, survivors often have many complex needs. These include serious mental health issues, severe physical injuries, and medical conditions. They are also very vulnerable to further exploitation, risk of more persecution, homelessness, extreme poverty, and intense loneliness. The foundation's team of therapists, doctors, and legal experts are known internationally for providing special care, medical advice, legal protection, and practical help to these survivors.
Retirement and Passing
In 2013, it was decided that Helen Bamber would step back from the daily running of the Foundation. She took on a new role as director emeritus (meaning she was still honored for her past leadership). She passed away in August 2014 in London at the age of 89 and was buried in the eastern part of Highgate Cemetery.
Awards and Honours
Helen Bamber received many awards and honours for her important work:
- 1993: European Woman of Achievement
- 1997: OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire)
- 1998: Lifetime's Achievement in Human Rights
- 2006: Beacon Fellowship Prize
- 2008: Jewish Care's Woman of Distinction
- 2009: The Cannes Film Festival honored the Helen Bamber Foundation's advertising campaign.
- 2009: Eileen Skellern Lifetime Achievement Award
- 2009: The Times/Sternberg Active Life Award
- 2009: Dag Hammarskjold Inspiration Award
- 2013: Inspiration Awards for Women – Human Rights Award
Honorary Degrees
She also received special degrees from many universities:
- University of Hull
- Oxford University
- University of Dundee
- University of Glasgow
- University of Ulster
- Kingston University
- The Open University
- Oxford Brookes University
- University of Essex
