Helen Bamber

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety nine, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week has devoted her life to helping people who have been tortured. At the age of twenty, at the end of the war and a rather joyless childhood in North London, she found herself working with the Jewish Relief Unit in Belsom. There she learned to listen and understand. After that, she studied psychoanalysis, worked in medical organisations and with Amnesty, until in 1985 she founded the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture. This is the culmination of her life's work, her determination to understand the trauma of torture and to try to alleviate it. Inevitably, a life lived so close to so much pain needs its escapes. I take great joy in small things, she says, pottering, even ironing. My work makes all these things seem very precious. She is Helen Bamber. And it's work, Helen, which you go on doing, even though you're now in your seventies. You you still see people, you still do casework, do you?

Helen Bamber1:28

Oh yes, I see people frequently. I came away this morning having seen someone who was tortured in his country of origin, who has many physical and some psychological difficulties, and who is fearful that he may be returned to the country which tortured him.

Presenter1:48

Which country is that?

Helen Bamber1:49

That's Turkey.

Presenter1:51

Because what is amazing as I read about your work is that there are ninety one countries that you have come across since nineteen eighty five where such torture goes on.

Helen Bamber1:57

Since 1985.

Presenter2:01

I suppose one shouldn't be surprised, but if you think about it, you think, well, you might be able to think of fifteen or twenty, but ninety one is a huge number. It is a huge number. Were you surprised when you discovered how many countries were still practising these abhorrent things?

Helen Bamber2:16

I think that my difficulty arose when I began to realize.

Helen Bamber2:23

at the emergence of Amnesty International, that people were still being tortured. I, like so many other people, had tried to deny it. I wanted to believe that everything had rested and ended in Belsen for me. That it you know, that Germany was the beginning and end of it, which was childish. It wasn't.

Presenter2:44

You must still be shocked by what you hear.

Helen Bamber2:46

Yes, I am shocked. My colleagues are shocked, and I think we should remain shocked, and I think if we're not, it's time to move on.

Helen Bamber2:54

Just recently in preparing material on Chile.

Helen Bamber2:59

A woman gave evidence who lived in a shanty town during the time of the military coup. Very simple woman who couldn't read and write properly.

Helen Bamber3:10

She was taken and tortured, but the thing that she told me that moved me so much was that at night the women of the shanty town would go down to the river, which was then called the River of Blood, because bodies of those that had been killed by the military coup floated down the river, and she explained how they turned the bodies over and looked into the faces of the dead people in order to memorize their faces, and that moved me to tears.

Helen Bamber3:43

Tell me about your first record.

Presenter3:45

Yeah.

Helen Bamber3:46

My first record is a Mendelssohn Song Without Words. It really is about my mother, who was an unhappy and unfulfilled person, but who had many gifts. She played the piano beautifully and sang well, and she also had the gift of being able to

Helen Bamber4:06

be very elegant in situations of absolute chaos, and my memory of her is sitting at the piano during air raids, looking extremely elegant, with her hair piled high and with a whimpering, miserable dog at her feet.

Speaker 14:12

Mm-hmm.

Presenter5:21

Daniel Baremboim playing one of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, opus sixty two, number one, in G major.

Presenter5:28

I wonder why you, Helen Bamber, what is it do you feel in your background that uh that led you to become a champion of the oppressed and the tortured?

Helen Bamber5:38

I think it was largely to do with my father and my father's um vision of a world in chaos.

Helen Bamber5:46

and a people being destroyed.

Helen Bamber5:50

and his early activity in trying to help refugees to leave Nazi Germany and to find a place

Presenter6:00

To flee to. Because you lived in North London and and obviously it was a Jewish family. Yes. But but he.

Presenter6:05

He was in no doubt about what was happening in the thirties.

Helen Bamber6:08

Oh, he was in no doubt whatsoever. He spoke perfect German.

Helen Bamber6:12

He worked for a firm of metal suppliers who had connections in Germany. He was extremely well informed. He would listen to the radio every night, the German radio.

Helen Bamber6:24

He would translate the broadcasts to me. He was um really quite obsessed with Goebbels's manipulation of language and words in order to create hatred.

Presenter6:37

But you say he he he told you about it. You would have been, what, seven, eight, nine, ten during the early thirties. Very small to be told about all of this. But did it weigh you down, this knowledge?

Speaker 16:42

Yeah.

Helen Bamber6:42

Yeah, research.

Speaker 16:43

Uh

Helen Bamber6:44

I was Rottle Smith.

Helen Bamber6:49

Do you know, I don't know. I think it was rather like I holding a vessel that I carried around with me, filled, and it it sort of every now and again I put it down and tried to be like everyone else. But I don't think I really succeeded, and I think I went on holding this rather brimming vessel of something that was always going to cascade. And I don't know whether that gives you an idea of how I felt as a child.

Presenter7:15

I I I said i in the introduction that that yours was a a rather joyless childhood. It wasn't just because of what your father told you was going on. It was also, I think, because of the relationship between your parents, wasn't it?

Helen Bamber7:26

They were extremely unhappy, and my father's um continuing preoccupation with the fate of refugees, with what was going to happen, certainly wore my mother down, who liked to entertain and to make chocolate eclairs. And money really began to disappear quite quickly as he became more and more concerned with helping people.

Presenter7:51

Oh, he was using the family money to get people out.

Helen Bamber7:53

Yes, I think he must have been, and this created um

Helen Bamber7:58

It created certainly resentment from my mother, although of course she was also very concerned but like so many people, she had the capacity to deny what was going to happen.

Presenter8:11

But you had an aunt who was your salvation to some extent, I think.

Helen Bamber8:14

Oh. She was. She was an amazing woman. She really was quite different than either my my father or my mother. She was absolutely outrageous. Platinum blonde, tight skirts. Um she taught me how to dress and where sex education j was concerned, she sort of announced one day

Helen Bamber8:36

You must remember that your shoes come off last that is very important. I never forgot it.

Helen Bamber8:45

Practiced it ever since. Well, it hasn't left me.

Helen Bamber8:50

But in the end you lost her.

Helen Bamber8:52

I lost her, she was killed.

Helen Bamber8:55

in an air raid when the Cafe de P Paris had a direct hit and she and the man she was going to marry, who'd been to Dunkirk, were killed.

Helen Bamber9:06

Tell me about it.

Presenter9:06

Your second record

Helen Bamber9:07

Uh

Presenter9:07

Uh

Helen Bamber9:09

Well, my second record is a Glenmiller.

Helen Bamber9:13

I think what I want to remember about the war is something about the dancing.

Helen Bamber9:18

Because the dancing that we did was taken so seriously. It was an affirmation of resilience, of companionship, of giving something to somebody

Helen Bamber9:28

Who perhaps was just about to go off to the war, and who you may you may never see again, who may be killed.

Helen Bamber9:36

I still want to do it when I hear this.

Presenter10:09

Glenn Miller and his orchestra playing String of Pearls and memories for my castaway Helen Bamber of dancing in the war years. And you were just about twenty, as I said in the introduction in 1945 when you were one of the first of a United Nations team to go into Belsen, the Nazi work camp, where thousands of people had died and were still dying, I think.

Presenter10:30

Had you you can't have had any idea when you signed up the sorts of things you were going to witness.

Helen Bamber10:36

We didn't go in immediately we were not allowed to go over immediately, for reasons that I've never quite understood, and we waited patiently to go as soon as liberation took place, and it was some months afterwards that we went in.

Helen Bamber10:50

I suppose people, yes, people were still dying.

Helen Bamber10:55

And people were still emaciated and people still needed to tell their story and still clung to you, wanting to say what happened to them. And did they?

Presenter11:05

Did they

Helen Bamber11:10

It it really wasn't a talking. I've described it many times as almost a kind of vomit. It was like a rasping sound of horror. They would repeat and repeat again of something that had happened, as if to get it out of their bodies. And I didn't understand this at first. I

Helen Bamber11:31

felt quite helpless and inadequate until I slowly realized that the act of taking that information had a value.

Presenter11:41

Because they need to know that somebody has heard it, that someone

Helen Bamber11:45

Somebody is borne witness to what happened to them.

Presenter11:47

Wow.

Helen Bamber11:48

And I feel just that today in the Medical Foundation, we are the witnesses.

Presenter11:52

But there must have come a time then, and still now, when you just get and got overwhelmed by it all, that suddenly you felt I can't listen to any more of this. You are, after all, any human yourself.

Presenter12:05

You know, it's very

Helen Bamber12:06

Very strange. I d I didn't get overwhelmed by listening, but

Helen Bamber12:13

I think what did overwhelm me was the banality, the kind of what I call casual brutality of people who

Helen Bamber12:21

really become bystanders who don't want to know, who don't want to listen. When the camps were first liberated there was a lot of sympathy, compassion. People, soldiers were absolutely overwhelmed by what they saw.

Helen Bamber12:35

But as the people got better and became vocal and wanted to leave the camps, they became a nuisance, they became stronger, and then attitudes changed, and it was that that overwhelmed me, and I began to understand something about

Helen Bamber12:53

The act of denial.

Helen Bamber12:55

within a bureaucracy and how essential it is to the bureaucrats and often to the decision makers to deny the truth.

Presenter13:04

Yeah.

Helen Bamber13:04

Uh

Presenter13:04

And curiously, one of the things you've said reminds you still of that time, is the smell of geraniums. H can you explain to me how?

Helen Bamber13:14

Yes. Um Belson had a very strange smell. It wasn't an unpleasant smell. It was a rather sweet smell of I can only describe crushed geraniums.

Helen Bamber13:29

And um

Helen Bamber13:31

Often um I

Helen Bamber13:34

Smell the geraniums on the patio.

Speaker 213:37

Uh

Helen Bamber13:38

It's about not denying, it's about remembering, never forgetting, the need to constantly bear witness.

Helen Bamber13:48

Next piece of music

Helen Bamber13:50

I could tell many, many stories of the people who I met in

Helen Bamber13:55

Belsen and in other camps and in the whole of my work in Germany.

Helen Bamber14:00

But the person I really want to commemorate, and would love to remember, I think, on the island, is a very courageous German woman who taught me so much.

Helen Bamber14:10

She had married a Jewish man.

Helen Bamber14:13

She had survived the camps and he had not.

Helen Bamber14:18

And she really, of all the people I knew, was the one who had

Helen Bamber14:23

least attention. This courageous, educated teacher who loved music, again who played the piano, who took me on long walks, who reprimanded me severely about my German accent and some for the lack of my education um a remarkable woman who I loved and admired.

Helen Bamber14:45

And she disappeared from sight, and I really don't know what happened to her.

Helen Bamber14:50

Um she loved Beethoven, she taught me a lot about Beethoven.

Helen Bamber14:54

And so f I'd like to remember a courageous German woman in the midst of all that.

Presenter16:00

The Amadeus Quartet playing part of the second movement of Beethoven's Great Fugue in B flat major, opus one hundred and thirty three.

Presenter16:07

You worked a lot in Germany, Helen, with children, but also back here with a group of children who came here from Auschwitz.

Speaker 116:11

Yeah.

Presenter16:15

They'd had no childhood, obviously, because of any experiences.

Helen Bamber16:17

Yeah.

Presenter16:19

They too were old beyond their years. Is that how they presented themselves to you? Is that how you felt about them?

Helen Bamber16:25

Yes, they were old be beyond their years. They had suffered immeasurably. They were orphan children from Auschwitz. They had been uh on forced labor, which is very brutal.

Helen Bamber16:37

They had to clean the gas chambers, they saw their families destroyed.

Helen Bamber16:44

They were a difficult group to work with and we had few resources. Could they talk about it?

Helen Bamber16:50

Not very much, but I think we were in a culture then where people actually felt after the war that you had to get on, you had to rebuild, you had to put things behind you. I think there are still people who still believe that.

Presenter17:04

Well, because we didn't understand then that there was such a thing as being traumatized, did we?

Helen Bamber17:07

Nice way. Uh

Presenter17:08

No. And that's exactly what they were, I presume.

Helen Bamber17:10

Yes, they were they were more than traumatized, I think. They had lived for so long.

Helen Bamber17:15

trying to preserve themselves during the daily selections that took place in Auschwitz, in which you either were sent to the gas chambers or you could work for another day. And what that does to people is unim and young children is unimaginable. children in their development

Presenter17:34

What would happen, though, if you among them, and I'm sure you did, discovered some who were really academically very bright, but obviously hadn't had their education because they'd been in the camps? What did you do with them? How could you could you get them through a system somewhere, or into a system?

Helen Bamber17:48

Oh yes.

Helen Bamber17:49

Some of the children were extremely clever, and we we endeavored to get them into schools, and I had one really very, very um bright young man who I wanted to get into a certain school in North London.

Helen Bamber18:04

and I had to take him before a group of um

Helen Bamber18:09

headmasters of a sort of panel to decide whether he was suitable.

Helen Bamber18:13

And there came a moment when I had to explain that there had been a period when he'd had absolutely no education at all whilst he was in Auschwitz, and the chair of the board said to me, But surely they gave them books to read.

Helen Bamber18:30

And I was so nonplussed I couldn't answer him, and we walked away from that meeting in silence. And it's something I've never forgotten, because it sums up again the capacity of people to deny what really happens.

Helen Bamber18:46

Cord number four.

Helen Bamber18:48

Number four is is is a ballad The Ballad of the Jewish Whore by Hans Eisler. It's a strange piece. I don't think I'd listen to it very often. But I would want to remind myself sometimes why I do or did what I did.

Helen Bamber19:03

It's a story based on the Nuremberg laws. The Nuremberg laws decreed that no Jewish woman could sleep with a German man. And th this is a story about a woman who did that. And for me, this sums up everything about state-sponsored racism that we have to be so careful about. It it invades everything. It invades the home, the schools, the bedroom, and leaves no place for love.

Speaker 219:35

The splash will steppe, the drumming shallager meet the master.

Speaker 119:40

Yeah.

Speaker 219:43

Got him him, since he eight was for Hatton, he was for Hitena.

Speaker 219:51

Keep me angels.

Presenter20:02

Guidon Sachs singing Hans Eisler's Ballad of the Jew Who, the words by Bertolt Brecht.

Presenter20:09

Helen, there's necessarily a political element to what you do with the people that you work with, as well as helping them medically and socially. You can often be asked to give evidence for them in all sorts of ways. Tell me, for example, was your foundation asked for evidence against General Pinochet in the recent case? And if so, what form would that evidence take?

Helen Bamber20:26

Mm-hmm.

Presenter20:30

Uh

Helen Bamber20:30

Uh

Presenter20:30

Yes.

Helen Bamber20:30

We have presented evidence to the House of Lords. We have many cases of Chileans who have been tortured, who we have known and we have examined.

Helen Bamber20:43

And I think an organisation such as ours has a duty not only to help.

Helen Bamber20:49

people who've been tortured, but also to look at the causes and to try to alleviate those causes in the future.

Presenter20:59

What is your view of people? Not of the Pinochet case, obviously, directly.

Presenter21:04

There's been a lot of discussion about whether Nazi criminals should be hunted down fifty years on. What is your view? Do you think it's always right that justice should be done?

Presenter21:15

I think you

Helen Bamber21:15

Justice should be seen to be done, yes, but I'm not sure that victims necessarily want punitive punishment. What I think many people would like to see is somebody made

Presenter21:30

To face the charges. But sometimes the victims themselves don't want to cooperate, and I think indeed your own husband was just such a person, wasn't he?

Helen Bamber21:38

In his later life, um even in the last few years, he has been able to speak out. He died, by the way, on the tenth of December.

Helen Bamber21:50

Human Rights Day.

Helen Bamber21:52

But he did speak out, he did make programmes for German um television and again late in life was able to speak.

Helen Bamber22:00

But when he was asked as a young man to identify the pictures of the men who had beaten his father to death on the night of the Crystal

Helen Bamber22:12

He did find that too difficult to um to face and turned away from it.

Presenter22:18

And do you think that that should be respected amongst victims of violence? Do you think if they don't want to pursue

Presenter22:26

and give evidence if they don't want to pursue the case, that that is right? Or do you think such a case should always be pursued, that justice should always not just be seen to be done, but be done? Good.

Helen Bamber22:36

I think justice has to be seen to be done, and I think if one person finds it difficult, others will not, and they will speak in a way for them.

Presenter22:46

And so the argument that goes that the perpetrators of these atrocities are now old men, why don't we just leave them alone and let them die with the history of it, you find unacceptable to me?

Helen Bamber22:57

I find it unacceptable, and I think it's important to give a message to present-day perpetrators like Milosevich.

Helen Bamber23:05

If we say that because they are old they must not face their crimes, then we are saying grow old and you may escape.

Helen Bamber23:14

And I think what we have to say is there is no escape from from justice.

Helen Bamber23:21

Next piece of music.

Presenter23:21

Uh

Helen Bamber23:23

My next piece of music is The Violin Stopped Playing by Leopold Gozlovsky, who is the last remaining klezma musician. The klezma musicians were a band of Jewish musicians who wandered from town to town playing music, going to weddings, being fed on the way and so on. And he composed a lot in honor of the people who had died in the Holocaust. But on this occasion he wanted to honour the forgotten people who died, the Roma and Sinta, who we call the gypsies who died, so many of them in Auschwitz.

Speaker 224:18

Dee dee dee dee da

Speaker 224:21

Yeah.

Presenter24:32

Leopold Kozlovsky playing and singing the music he wrote for Alexander Ramati's film The Violin Stopped Playing.

Presenter24:39

Helen, you also have tales to tell about

Presenter24:43

Terrible violence at home on our own doorstep. I know that you've been very involved in Northern Ireland, for example.

Speaker 224:48

Uh

Presenter24:51

torture, but it's certainly uh you know, the result of bombings, isn't it? And so on that you've witnessed there. That becomes part of your work too.

Helen Bamber24:58

Yeah.

Helen Bamber24:59

Yes, it does. I mean, I'm I'm close to a group of women who work in Northern Ireland, uh women who have come across uh the divides to meet together.

Helen Bamber25:09

Catholic and Protestant women who've both suffered loss of relatives through bombing or through other forms of violence. And I have an enormous admiration for these Gutsy women, I really have. They help people to grieve

Helen Bamber25:28

And some of the cases are really very sad indeed. What kinds of people have you worked with?

Helen Bamber25:35

Well, I've seen people whose wives and children have been killed.

Helen Bamber25:41

In bombing

Helen Bamber25:43

I've seen people elsewhere, outside Ireland, who have been subjected to gunning down.

Helen Bamber25:53

and people whose relatives have disappeared, just as the people have disappeared in Argentina and in Uruguay and in Chile, mothers and wives whose husbands and sons walked out of the door one day and who

Helen Bamber26:12

who never came back and who are doing exactly what the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo do and women in Argentina are doing.

Helen Bamber26:20

you know, making the bed, dusting the mirror, putting a handkerchief in the pocket, getting the clothes cleaned, waiting, never believing that the person is dead. And this is so difficult, and this is such a legacy that they have to live with.

Helen Bamber26:39

Tell me about record number six. My sixth record is Pablo Casal's playing The Song of the Birds, and I want this really because it is such a beautiful

Helen Bamber26:51

Beautiful piece of music.

Presenter27:53

Pablo Casal's playing part of his Song of the Birds with the Praad Festival Orchestra, and that was recorded in nineteen fifty four.

Presenter28:00

A lot of the people you deal with, Helen, are seeking asylum in this country under the Declaration of Human Rights, Article fourteen.

Presenter28:08

What a government, our government has to do, of course, is to try and sort the genuine cases from those who simply see us as as a comfortable billet, which means that immigration officials, not least, are very sceptical about some of these people. You find that scepticism offensive, don't you?

Helen Bamber28:24

Yes, I do. I believe there's a climate of disbelief.

Helen Bamber28:28

And I think that there are very few people who seek asylum who would not rather, if things were different, be in their own country. This is not a place of comfort. There are no benefits or few benefits for people.

Presenter28:43

The proposal now, of course, under the the current asylum bill is that they should be offered even less. They should cease to have cash benefits they should have vouchers instead. How do you react to that?

Helen Bamber28:52

I think this is degrading.

Helen Bamber28:54

I think this is making them into objects and is making them feel like objects. One of the few things left to asylum seekers and people who are refugees is the choice of food that they eat and buy.

Helen Bamber29:11

And often the markets are places that they love and that they are used to and are economical for them. And to deny them that choice is to make them into something lesser to make them into a lesser being than anyone else.

Presenter29:25

But do you have some sympathy with the view that if a nation is too generous to asylum seekers, that it will pay the price, that it will be exploited much more than other countries?

Helen Bamber29:36

I don't think that we're in danger of being too generous ever to asylum seekers. And it's something to do with procedures, and it's something to do with attitudes, and it's something to do with the decision makers being courageous enough to say that this that they have a moral duty under the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and that they will honour that duty. How many European countries gather round tables to look at how we can share the burden, but also how we can look at the reasons why refugees become refugees and whether we ourselves have some responsibility in the making of refugees? Who do we supply arms to?

Helen Bamber30:26

Why do people come and flee from war torn areas where torture and atrocity takes place? Is there a way in which we can alleviate this problem?

Helen Bamber30:37

Record number seven.

Helen Bamber30:39

Number seven is Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time.

Helen Bamber30:45

He wrote this really at the very dark days of the beginning of the war.

Helen Bamber30:50

It was really in response to the Kristallnacht.

Helen Bamber30:54

and what he saw coming.

Helen Bamber30:56

But he uni I think he universalized his work, and I would like the spiritual of anger, which I think speaks for all oppressed people throughout the world.

Speaker 231:11

This was in

Speaker 231:26

The breast sword they could not stand.

Speaker 231:40

Thus spake the Lord bold Moses said.

Speaker 232:01

If not I snipe your firstborn death.

Presenter32:10

Damon Evans and the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performing Go Down Moses from Sir Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time, conducted by Richard Hickox. Helen, you must dread people asking what you do for a living.

Helen Bamber32:24

I must say it's a misery. If I saw at a party, you know, holding a wobbly glass of wine and a little canopy, wondering whether, you know, you're going to be able to put the whole bit in your mouth or not, or whether you can bite into it, and somebody says, well, what do you do?

Presenter32:42

What do you say?

Helen Bamber32:43

Well, a waffle.

Presenter32:46

But it is hard. What of your own life, Helen, your personal life? It seems to me reading about you that that in many ways your personal life has been subsumed by your work. Is that is that in many ways a price you've had to pay?

Helen Bamber32:58

I think so.

Helen Bamber33:00

I think you do lose friends on the way, actually.

Presenter33:03

What about family? I think your own boys have had some problems as a result of your being so active and so driven, really.

Helen Bamber33:10

Yes, I think certainly my son David has spoken very honestly about his um about his feelings about this. But I would say one thing about about that. Um I think it says something about the communication between us, that he's able to speak so honestly.

Presenter33:33

But I wonder in in a way if that isn't a um an echo of the way uh you were with your father, that your father equally was driven to work for other people.

Helen Bamber33:44

Yes, he was. But I don't think that I um imposed on my sons the same sense of urgency and guilt that both my parents imposed on me, and I tried hard not to do that. Sometimes I think those of us with rather jo as you quite rightly said, joyless childhood

Helen Bamber34:06

um tend to turn over backwards really in order to reverse it. And I ga I try to give the boys a lot of freedom. And it has been said that perhaps

Helen Bamber34:18

Freedom wasn't as important to them as it was to me in my childhood, not having had it. And I'm I wonder sometimes whether parents can ever win. Tell me about your last record.

Helen Bamber34:31

My last record is The M People, Search for the Hero. I think it says everything. I think it says that we can do it. However ordinary we are, we can do it. We can make change.

Speaker 234:46

Don't search for the hero inside yourself

Speaker 234:51

Search for the secrets can hide.

Speaker 234:56

Search, old hero in Sajos!

Speaker 235:00

Until you find the

Speaker 235:03

Uh

Presenter35:10

M people and search for the hero. Now, Helen, if you could only take one of your eight records with you, which one would you take?

Presenter35:17

Uh

Helen Bamber35:17

I think it won't be.

Presenter35:17

Uh

Helen Bamber35:17

Would have to be the song of the birds. And your book?

Helen Bamber35:22

Well, I would like to take a book called Poet for Poet by Richard McCain, who is himself a poet.

Helen Bamber35:30

His compilation of poems I think are wonderful.

Helen Bamber35:35

Some are sad, but they're about life, they're about resilience, they're about love.

Helen Bamber35:40

And I could just pick up a poem now and again and read it and find something that's going to help me to survive another day. And your luxury.

Helen Bamber35:51

Well, I would like a wind up radio, if that is possible, so that I can listen to the world service. I listen to the world service every night in bed.

Helen Bamber36:03

It would give me a sense of continuity. And do please let me have.

Presenter36:12

Helen Bamber, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 136:24

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.