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Date of Interview:
27/10/03
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INTERVIEW:
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Place of Birth:
London
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Date of Interview:
27/10/03
Interviewed By:
Dr Bea Lewkowicz

Interview Summary
Helen Bamber OBE was a psychotherapist and Human Rights activist. She was born in London in 1925 to parents of Polish background. Her father was active in helping refugees from Germany and refugees often visited the house. Helen joined the Jewish Relief Unit in 1944. A few months after liberation in 1945, she was sent to Eilshausen to work with Henry Lunzer, the Head of the Jewish Relief in Germany and was part of the first rehabilitation teams to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
After returning to the UK in 1947, she became a case worker for ‘the Boys’, orphaned Jewish children who were allowed to come into the UK. She met husband at the end of the war. He came from Nuremberg and was interned and sent to Australia on the Dunera. Helen later worked for Amnesty International. In 1985 she founded the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture. She was awarded the OBE in 1995 and set up the Helen Bamber Foundation in 2005. She died, aged 89, in 2014. Dr Bea Lewkowicz interviewed Helen her for the AJR Refugee Voices Archive in 2003. The building where the interview was conducted and the Foundation is housed was given to the Foundation by the family of a German Jewish refugee, who thought that the work of the Foundation is an important legacy which links the fact of the German Jewish refugees to the refugees of today.
