Helen Bamber

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.

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 the uncle 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.

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