Andrew Hogg writes:

AT THE age of 60, a time of life when many start to take things easy, Helen Bamber, who died on 21 August, aged 89, embarked on a project that had been a long-held dream: the setting up of an organisation in London dedicated to the care of victims of torture. It was work that was to consume her until the end.

Operating initially out of a hut in the office yard of Amnesty International, then in two rooms in a largely abandoned hospital, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom from Torture) saw 45 clients in its first year of operation, 1986.

Most were recent exiles, having fled sundry South American dictatorships and Middle Eastern regimes. But they included, too, Eric Lomax, the subject of the recent film The Railway Man, who was still haunted by his treatment at the hands of the Japanese secret police in the Second World War. More of Eric's comrades were to follow.

By the time Helen left, nearly 20 years later, support for the organisation, always heavily dependent on voluntary donations, enabled it to move via a suite of small consulting-rooms in Kentish Town into a £4-million purpose-built block in Finsbury Park, and begin setting up centres outside London.

Along the way, it had picked up an international reputation for the services it offered: medical care and consultation, psychological treatment and support, and practical assistance.

By then, new referrals, mainly asylum-seekers, had grown to more than 2000 a year, many of whom also needed practical help in navigating the asylum system, whether with housing, with the scant benefits to which they were entitled, or with education for their children.

But the crucial reason that many came, as they still do, was to have their accounts of torture forensically documented in medico-legal reports prepared by expert doctors and lawyers, to present to the Home Office in support of their asylum claims. The fact that a person has been tortured is not sufficient qualification for asylum, but such a report can show a person has a real fear of being tortured again on return, which is, or should be, grounds for refugee status.

Until the move to Finsbury Park, Helen in many ways personified the Medical Foundation, seeing clients late into the evening and at weekends, offering sympathy, support, and practical advice, and galvanising staff with her dedication, and giggled outrage at some inanity or other from the immigration authorities. It was, for her, the culmination of a life spent fighting suffering - and stone-hearted officialdom.

The child of parents of Polish-Jewish extraction, and born and raised in north London, she had, while a young teenager, learned of the horrors of Nazi Germany from her father, fluent in German, who would listen on the radio to the invective spewing from Berlin, and translate. The rise of the Blackshirts here brought it all horribly home.

In 1945, then aged 20, Helen joined the Jewish Relief Unit, and was posted to the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany to help survivors. Although the typhus-ridden huts had been razed to the ground, there were still thousands of former inmates living in former barracks near by, with no homes to which to return. The handful who had made their way back to Eastern Europe had been murdered on arrival.

Helen was to stay for two years, absorbing two lessons that would shape her future work. The first was the value of listening. Former inmates close to death would recount to her over and over again the horrors that had befallen them. "They wanted the world to know," she said later. All she could offer was to stand witness, but it seemed to help.

The second lesson she learned was the speed with which officialdom can choose to ignore suffering. Within months of the camp's liberation, she recounted, the survivors were regarded by the British authorities in that part of Germany as a "bloody nuisance" in their insistence that a home should be found for them. For many, Palestine, not then Israel yet, became the only option.

On returning to England, Helen was appointed to the Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration, and soon after married Rudi Bamberger, a German Jewish refugee, by whom she had two sons. His father had been killed in front of him during Kristallnacht.

A succession of jobs in the nascent NHS followed; then, with the setting up of Amnesty International in 1961, Helen became a keen activist, eventually recruiting around her a small group of doctors who were prepared, after surgery hours, to treat survivors of torture, newly arrived in Britain. Thus was born the idea of the Medical Foundation.

Regarding herself primarily as a therapist, Helen made little secret of her distaste for management: it took her away, she said, from the real work.

That distaste ultimately led her to part company with the Medical Foundation in 2005 - a parting that deeply rankled. But the work was all; so, at the age of 80, she set up today's Helen Bamber Foundation, with a broader remit than the Medical Foundation, in that it also treats those who have suffered violations such as slavery, or have been trafficked for sex work.

Shortly before Helen left the Medical Foundation, Eric Lomax, who had been tortured to within an inch of his life after Japanese guards found a radio set in his hut on the Burma railway, wrote in praise of Helen's skills.

"You asked me so gently and quietly to tell my story. . . You listened so patiently and sympathetically. The first thing that surprised me was the breadth of your knowledge and experience; you had heard about everything I spoke about, from different people with different histories from different countries.

"I had thought my experience was unique, and would be difficult to explain. It was such a relief to know that you understood, and that you were aware of the ways in which systematic deliberate torture can be so devastating."

It was a fitting tribute.