The Good Listener

Helen Bamber: a life against cruelty

Plot

Since she went to Belsen in 1945, to work with survivors of the camp at the age of nineteen, Helen Bamber's life has been devoted to working with people who have suffered the most appalling physical and psychological damage at the hands of others. From survivors of the holocaust (including her own husband) and of the Burma railroad, through the victims of South African, Argentinian, Iraqi, Iranian and Israeli regimes, she has fought for and worked to heal those who have suffered at the hands of political and military torturers. Neil Belton will use her story as the basis to examine the extraordinary resurrection of torture as an instrument of political power in our century, the experiences of sufferers, in a book that will be both a powerful and harrowing examination of the darkest sides of humanity, and of the character of one extraordinary, good and complex human being. This will be a remarkable and important book.