Helen Bamber
Went to Belsen at 20, and sixty years later was still sitting with survivors of torture
Helen Balmuth grew up in north London in a Jewish family from Poland. Her father, convinced that catastrophe was coming, read passages of Mein Kampf aloud to her as a child so that she would understand what was being said about people like them. It was a bleak education, and it worked.
In 1945, aged twenty, she joined the Jewish Relief Unit and was sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp shortly after its liberation. She stayed for about two years. What she learned there, she said later, was that the survivors did not want to be cheered up; they wanted someone to sit with them, hold them and hear what had happened, and to be able to bear it. She would describe her whole later career as an attempt to do that properly.
Back in Britain she worked with child survivors, then in hospitals and for Amnesty International's medical group, examining people who had been tortured abroad. In 1985 she founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, now Freedom from Torture, which brought doctors, therapists and lawyers together to treat refugees and document what had been done to them. It began in a couple of rooms and grew to treat thousands of people a year.
She left it in 2005, aged eighty, and immediately started the Helen Bamber Foundation to work with victims of trafficking and other cruelty. She was still seeing clients in her late eighties. She died in 2014.