Ethics, Politics, and Minorities

Excerpt

The late Helen Bamber was a distinguished pioneer of torture, trauma survivor, and refugee welfare work in the United Kingdom. She paints a vivid picture of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 as a young Jewish welfare worker. She describes what she calls the Saturday afternoon war movie view of joyous liberation and how different the reality was. The initial outpouring of pity and horror at the amount of death, starvation, and ill-treatment on an unimaginable scale was followed by a prolonged period of resettlement which was far less empathic, as so many survivors had nowhere to go. Compassion fatigue can set in whereby those who are seen to be disadvantaged or worse wear out the wider attention span and goodwill pool. …