The Good Listener
Helen Bamber: A Life Against Cruelty
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'Essential reading... A horrifying account of the worst that human beings can do to each other. Neil Belton's synthesis of biography and history is masterly.' Anthony Storr, Sunday Times
Helen Bamber went to Belson in 1945 to work with survivors of the camp. She was just twenty. Since then her life has been involved with the worst side of the last half-century. In 1985, at the age of sixty, she set up an organisation devoted to helping victims of torture and to bearing witness against the fact of torture. This is her story. It is also a haunting unusual narrative of the post-war world. This 2012 edition offers a new introduction by the author.
'The story of Bamber's life acts as a framework or prism through which some of the worst events of this century of horrors are addressed.' Times Literary Supplement
'[Belton] writes beautifully about an ugly subject... with compassion but also with clarity.' Scotsman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Belton capably and sympathetically renders the gripping drama of international human rights activist Helen Bamber's life and work, having been accorded full access to his subject and her associates. Raised in Britain by Jewish parents of Polish extraction, Bamber (b. 1925) was deeply affected by the newspaper accounts of Hitler's atrocities that her father read to her as a child. Her lifelong commitment to human rights began in 1945 when she traveled to Germany as a member of the Jewish Relief Unit and saw for herself what Holocaust survivors had been through. Back in Britain, she married a German Jewish refugee and gave birth to two sons before involving herself in activism, focusing on mothers' rights in hospitals, and midwifing the publication of a passionate expos of unscrupulous doctors who performed experimental medicine on children and helpless adults. After her divorce, Bamber became deeply involved in Amnesty International and worked for those who had been tortured in Algeria and Chile. Belton's meticulous research and eye for detail inform the many anecdotes highlighting his subject's fight against the use of torture. In 1985, Bamber left Amnesty International and founded the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, under whose auspices she testified in Israel on behalf of a Palestinian prisoner in 1993. Although Belton includes negative comments from one of Bamber's sons that imply neglect, and criticism from colleagues who call her a "complete dictator," Bamber's documented altruism and heroism eclipse any personal defects.
