Helen Bamber (1925-2014) Photograph: Helen Bamber Foundation

My hero: Helen Bamber by Helena Kennedy 

This tiny, exquisite woman would take on people's pain and somehow help to make them whole again

Helen Kennedy
Friday 5 September 2014

Imet Helen Bamber when I was presenting the BBC series Heart of the Matter in 1986. I was doing a programme about the ethical basis for providing asylum to those who were fleeing persecution and, as the founder and director of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now known as Freedom from Torture), Helen was the perfect interviewee.

She had been a very young woman when she entered the Belsen concentration camp with the British military, and it had changed her life for ever. The sheer horror of what she saw, and hearing the effects that incarceration in the camp had on the survivors informed her life's work with people who were profoundly traumatised. This tiny, exquisite woman, with a beautiful soft voice and enormous capacity for love, would take on people's pain and somehow help to make them whole again – or almost whole. As she said herself, there was no complete recovery from such inhumanity.

In the years that followed I frequently turned to Helen with my own legal cases when I needed help: cases involving asylum seekers who were not believed because they bore no bodily scars – women who had experienced multiple rape, and children who had been forced to take up arms and kill – people whose lesions were on their souls. Her compassion was without measure.

I once brought her a woman whose child had been pulled off the street, sexually violated, murdered and then cut into countless pieces. The killer was sentenced to life in prison but the end of the trial brought no solace to this mother, whose suffering was endless. I had no way to console her. I phoned Helen, who never refused me. She was the only person who could give her some kind of peace. As Helen opened the door and drew this woman into her consulting room, I stood in the street and wept, thanking the heavens for this extraordinary human being whose days had more hours than most and whose heart was so capacious. She was and remains my hero.

THE GUARDIAN