Book of a lifetime: The Good Listener by Neil Belton

From The Independent archive: Margaret Forster on ‘The Good Listener’ by Neil Belton

The book is based on the life of Helen Bamber (PA)

When I was a mere seven years old, I went with a friend to the cinema, and before the children’s film we’d gone to see they showed a newsreel that included shots of the liberation of Belsen. I don’t think I felt shock or horror, because I had no idea what the images signified. I felt bewildered: who were these skeletons? How had they become like that? What would happen to them?

I went home and tried to describe what I’d seen, and asked these questions, only to be told it was outrageous that the newsreel had been shown with children watching and that I should forget what I’d seen. It was to do with the war that had just finished, and it was all over. But I didn’t forget. I went on to become a reader of everything to do with the war – histories, biographies, memoirs – and the questions became more pressing. How could atrocities like Belsen have happened? How could human beings torture other human beings in this way? And a new question arose: could the survivors overcome their horrific experiences? Could they “forget it”?

It was certainly what everyone, in the 1950s, seemed to want them to do, or if they couldn’t forget then maybe they could just keep it to themselves. For so many survivors, this was their experience: what Primo Levi was to call “the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story”. Well, as I grew up I wanted to listen and learn. But not until Neil Belton published The Good Listener in 1998 did I properly begin to understand that what happened in Belsen and other concentration camps fits into a continuing history of modern cruelty. Its framework is the life of Helen Bamber.