Champion of the tortured compels Discovery audience

When you hear the term "asylum seeker" beware of automatically inserting the tag "bogus" - as today's media climate increasingly invites you to do.

Dr Helen Bamber's practical advice to the 200 plus people assembled for this year's Discovery Lecture added a chilling contemporary note to an experience better associated with Moseley's Blackshirts stirring up hatred in London in the 1930s. This was something Helen Bamber experienced first hand when, as the child of a Jewish family before the Second World War, she saw and heard the way the repeated misuse of language could subtly make prejudice the norm.

This small, astonishing 75-year old woman, has devoted her life to helping the victims of the most horrific acts devised by man. In a compelling and poignant hour-long speech delivered without a note, Dr Bamber took the audience on a journey which started with her personal need to help the survivors at Belsen at the end of the war. At the age of 19, frustrated at her own helpless amidst this horror and human wreckage, she gradually understood that the best she could do for these people was to "bear witness" to their experience.

"To sit down and rock with them. To allow them to dig their bony fingers into my arms and let them vomit out their awful stories - that was what was important. That is what we are doing today with survivors of many forms of torture and barbarity."

A second key thing she learned was "how short compassion is". Survivors of the camps continued to be treated in camps as "displaced persons" for some years after the end of the war. Initially the world was very sympathetic but as the victims gradually formed themselves into committees and asked for recognition for their needs they quickly came to be regarded as a nuisance.

On return to Britain and after working with a psychoanalyst she began to understand how the coping mechanisms that allow someone to survive in the most extreme circumstances obstruct their adaptation to "normal" life. The crushing of all feeling, lack of trust and lack of communication cannot just be thrown off on return to normality.

Partly in response to all of this she and others founded the charity Amnesty International. "It started in a bedsit in London. It was not salubrious, there were just a few people - a surgeon, a priest and myself a social worker." "We had evidence of torture being devised to give maximum pain while leaving no signs. We had evidence that in some cases doctors were involved.... that it used science, it used medicine."

Even today although every country in the world outlaws torture one third of the world practise or condone it.

Today some 500 volunteer health professionals are involved in Amnesty International. They pursue many missions abroad and a key activity remains "bearing witness" - taking testimony and documenting evidence.

"Torture is one of the most destructive things. It leaves terrible memories that will not go away. You are reminded of them every day in life - a car horn, an electrical plug, a child's scream, a bicycle spoke...People are never the same after torture. They feel violated..."

But Dr Bamber can still find inspiration in the capacity of people to survive and surmount such horror - many of them in the most extraordinary way. She told the audience of an Iranian Kurd on starvation and under the threat of death who moulded in his mouth his tiny bread ration into chess pieces to play. And of an Argentinean being held in solitary confinement who learned by looking through a keyhole and twitching his eyelid to communicate with another prisoner.

Dr Bamber went on to found the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture in 1985. The foundation uses a range of techniques to "help people to grieve for the grotesque" as part of the healing process. Among those who have sought help there is Eric Lomax, whose experiences as a prisoner of war of the Japanese on the Death Railway in Burma and Siam, was captured in The Railway Man.

"Time is the most important thing you can give...time for them, time for their family and most importantly to be available to their children on whom this can have an enormous impact."

Dr Bamber, who was clearly moved by the "enormous warmth and thoughtfulness" she had met with in Dundee, was thanked by Vice Chancellor Sir Alan Langlands who said "This remarkable woman has done more than anyone else to tackle human rights abuses. The Medical Foundation needs and deserves wider support."

The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture is at www.torturecare.org.uk

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