Human rights campaigner Helen Bamber dies aged 89

Leading figures from charity world, as well as film stars Colin Firth and Emma Thompson, pay tribute to 'human rights icon'

Human rights campaigner and early member of Amnesty International Helen Bamber has died, the Helen Bamber Foundation has announced.

Leading figures from the charity world, and film stars Colin Firth and Emma Thompson, have paid tribute to the "human rights icon".

Bamber was a psychotherapist who began helping victims of torture and atrocities aged 20 when she started working with survivors of the Holocaust. She died on Thursday aged 89.

She was among one of the first rehabilitation teams to enter the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and in a career spanning nearly 70 years she helped tens of thousands of men, women and children confront the horror and brutality of the camps.

She used her vast experience to work with Firth on his film The Railway Man, an account of a British officer captured by the Japanese during the second world war and made to work on the Thai-Burma railway – also known as the "death railway" because of the thousands of prisoners who perished building it.

Firth said his encounter with Bamber was life-changing and the compassion she showed had touched him for life.

He said: "Helen was not inclined to share her insights for interest's sake or simply for creative research. Her aim in life was to heal people whose damage was profound and seemingly intractable.

"But I realised that her work was also to endow those of us who hadn't suffered such things with something of her compassion toward those who had. If she had succeeded in any of this with just one individual, her work would have been worthwhile. But the numbers are beyond count."

He said that even in old age and ill health Bamber continued to be determined to do all she could to help those affected by slavery, torture and human rights abuses.

He said: "I marvelled that anyone could find the strength to engage with so many desperate stories without being engulfed by them.

"Her courage, wisdom and pragmatism were formidable – and what she did worked.

"But ultimately it was her compassion which one felt the most. It was contagious. I am quite certain that because of this her work will flourish and proliferate – not only through the remarkable team of people at the HBF – but through everyone who came into contact with her."

Actor Thompson, who is president of the Helen Bamber Foundation, said: "Not only is she a great listener and an incredible interpreter, but she never lets her imagination run dry.

"She resists institutionalism. She knows which borders should be crossed and melds them together."