Most of us entertain relatively modest ambitions: to have work that fulfils us, someone to love, something to pass on to our children. Others dream of achieving much more, while still hoping to avoid physical or emotional pain and the consequences of war, famine and torture. If we're lucky. For Helen Bamber, born into a Polish-Jewish family in London in 1925, the realities of anti Semitism, followed by war and genocide, were inescapable, and her life has been defined by her inability to be a bystander at the suffering of others.
Constantly alerted by her father, a haunted anti-Fascist campaigner, to the threat of propaganda, political cruelty and abuse of state power, Bamber had an unusual and truncated childhood. At the age of 20 she travelled alone to Belsen to work for the Jewish Relief Unit with survivors of the camp, an experience which remained with her and taught her much of what she knows about working with the victims of extreme cruelty. Having played a very prominent part for many years in Amnesty International, now, at the age of 73, she runs a human rights organisation in London called the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture. It is dedicated to helping victims of torture and to bearing witness against the widespread persistence of political cruelty throughout the world, through the first-hand accounts of its victims.
"At the core of Helen Bamber's work is the belief that testimony, the open and public recognition of the truth of what was done to people, is part of any achievable measure of healing, small though that may be." This is how the London-based Irish author, Neil Belton, describes Bamber's work in his new book about her life, The Good Listener. Born in Dublin and currently publishing director at Granta Books, Belton has been a book editor for almost 20 years, and was the editor of Brian Keenan's memoir, An Evil Cradling. The Good Listener marks his debut as a writer, and he is clearly more comfortable sitting behind the scenes than in the interviewee's chair.
A highly original fusion of the personal and the public, the book straddles the genres of biography, history and reflective moral essay, employing the techniques of the novelist as well as the journalist, stretching the boundaries of conventional biography. His engaged, acutely sensitive narrative is interspersed with direct quotes from hours of interviews he conducted with Bamber and with a wide range of people with whom she has worked over the years. He frequently departs from her story to bring in the voices of people whose lives she has touched: he talks to Holocaust survivors who were brought to Britain in the late 1940s; to Bamber's former husband, Rudi - a German-Jew who survived Kristallnacht; to her two sons; to British veterans who worked as slave-labourers under the Japanese on the Burma-Siam railway and, harrowingly, to victims of torture in Chile. He places her life in the context of political activism in London in the inter-war years, and interweaves the three main strands of Bamber's life's work: the connections she made between the lack of controls on medical research (before the introduction of a medical ethics code), doctors' participation in torture in many countries, and the experiences of the victims of torture.
"I always kept a sense of Bamber and the trajectory of her life in front of me as I wrote," says Belton. "I wanted to write about the texture of a human life. I almost felt overwhelmed by the history, but I tried to bring it emotionally and personally alive. I didn't want to slip into abstraction. "The strength of her character offered a way of integrating the personal story and the objective historical events. Her life led in so many different directions, and she is a very complicated person. I wanted the book to reflect that."
His book takes readers to places we are reluctant to visit. To Algeria, where in the 1950s the war there shocked Europe out of the post-Holocaust conviction that systematic political cruelty would never again be perpetrated; to Chile, with its "willed political amnesia" of the horrors experienced under Pinochet; to many of the 60 countries which currently condone or permit torture 15 years after the UN passed the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which builds on Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
"One of the themes that emerged and made the book difficult to write was the suffering human body in politics," Belton says. "Once you start to think about that, rather than looking at abstract questions, you can no longer rationalise it away. The Medical Foundation keeps this to the forefront, reminding us that we cannot justify this slide into barbarism. "Of course our instinct is to put the question of political cruelty to one side. As I was writing the book, and talking to these people about their experiences, I felt that I was hearing things that are in the most literal sense obscene. I had to make it real without becoming complicit with the obscenity."
As his work progressed Belton felt increasing respect for Bamber and her commitment to speaking and hearing about the unspeakable. Without any formal qualifications, she seems to possess a singular combination of empathy, pragmatism and leadership which has enabled her to campaign tirelessly for many causes, including in the early 1960s, for the right of mothers to stay with their sick children in British hospitals. Yet The Good Listener is not hagiography; far from it. We are given the perspectives of Bamber's colleagues at the Medical Foundation who have often found it difficult to be around someone whose standards are so uncompromising. We also hear from her two sons who speak candidly of the toll her single-minded campaigning took on family life. Belton frequently questions Bamber's motivation, delicately teasing out questions about the emotional neediness or egotism of people who choose to be carers and therapists.
One of his underlying questions is what is goodness - can the impulse to help others and to alleviate suffering be pure and untainted? He writes at one point about "the self-importance of being with the damaged, the bit of God that sticks to every rescuer. There is a pleasure in working with people in extreme situations and a feeling of omnipotence that is close to despair." Later, acknowledging his scepticism, he elaborates: "in the climate of suspicion which is our inheritance from Freud and Darwin, everything has its place, including altruism: we calculate motives and value distrust."
But in the context of our current culture of wounds - "the culture of complaint" as Robert Hughes puts it - Bamber comes across as a strikingly clear-sighted person who resists sentimentalising the victim, wallowing in pain or glorifying suffering. She is suspicious of the facile use of therapeutic language and of any narrowly reductionist treatment of trauma. The Medical Foundation focuses on why torture is used and how it can be prevented. "You have to place torture in a proper context," Bamber says at one point. "It isn't only about sadistic impulses. It's about power, about privilege, about poverty and the distribution of resources; it's about something which is most preventable."
"Very few people can do the kind of work she does," Belton says. "If people like her didn't exist as barometers, the world would be an even less human place. But each of us has to accept our limitations and respond to the existence of cruelty and violence in whatever way we can. I suppose this book is my way of doing it. At times, I felt defeated, even repelled, thinking: how on earth can I do justice to this? I just wanted to stop."
Did he know why he was doing it? "That's the question, of course. I'm still trying to answer it." The book he has written answers it, in part. One of the therapists at the Medical Foundation refers to the "redeeming power of narrative", and emphasises the importance of listening to the stories of the victims of torture. This was one of the first things that Bamber learned at Belsen and it is crucial to Belton also. "Yes. Witness is very important. It is striking how many survivors write an account of their experiences and need their stories to be heard sympathetically. "But beyond that there is the political effect. Amnesty does wonderful work, but for many people it's only a narrative such as Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved that connects them in a real way to the implications of cruelty. Or Henri Alleg's account of torture in Algeria, which had more effect than countless parliamentary denunciations. It's easy to disconnect cruelty from our lives. These narratives alert us to the consequences of an atrocious politics."
His own narrative is another challenging act of witness - to the bleak truths about this century's recent history, viewed through the prism of one exceptional woman's life. Accustomed to his editorial role as the midwife to other writers' creativity, Belton is diffident about making claims for himself or what he has written. But it is obvious that there is more than one "good listener" involved in this book. Like Bamber, he clearly possesses qualities of compassion and perception that allowed him to respond in a fearlessly honest way to the testimony of others.
He has woven their stories into an account that embeds itself in the reader's memory, leaving us with more questions about human destructiveness and anguish than most of us can hope to answer. "It certainly tells us something," he concedes in his introduction, "like an exposure of black light, an image from the dark of her time and ours."
The Good Listener: Helen Bamber - a Life Against Cruelty is published this week by Weidenfeld & Nicholson