Helen Bamber Discusses Her Work with Torture Victims.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JULY 08, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 070801np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Helen Bamber's Crusade for Torture Victims
Sect: News; International
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest Helen Bamber works with the victims of state-sponsored torture from around the world. About 16 years ago, at the age of 60, she founded the group The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which is based in London where she lives.

Her work with victims started after World War II when she went to Germany as a volunteer with the Jewish relief unit and worked with death camp survivors. Bamber has also been active in Amnesty International and served on the executive council of the British section.

A new book about her called, "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A life Against Cruelty" has been written by Neil Belton. We invited Bamber to talk with us about her work. Although torture is internationally outlawed, it is still used by over 90 governments to repress and intimidate people.

I asked Bamber to describe her work with torture victims.

HELEN BAMBER, FOUNDER, DIRECTOR, THE MEDICAL FOUNDATION FOR THE CARE OF VICTIMS OF TORTURE: I think when we talk about torture, people think of a tortured body. A body that has been assaulted, perhaps mutilated, burned. And all these things are seen in the Medical Foundation today. And by the way, we've seen over 16,500 people since we started at the end of '85.

But torture is far more complex than that, because it's about witness to atrocity; it's about seeing your wife raped and humiliated, your children tortured. It's about a man, for example -- just one example, a man who was forced to applaud at the public execution of his son.

And the way the doctor who was treating him actually found a way to help him to mourn and, in so many words, bury his son. It's a very moving story. And it's indicative really that you're not just looking at broken limbs and deafened ears and blind eyes.

You're looking at something very subtle that is going to have its impact on families and children, perhaps for several generations. And that's why interventions of a creative kind, looking at people's resilience, at their coping mechanisms, looking at women's skills not just at their agony is very, very important.

So, it's more a philosophy than a practice that I'm demonstrating to you, I think.

GROSS: Torture is sadly something that dates back to ancient times. It's not -- it's not anything new. But I'm wondering if you think that approaches to torture have changed in the years that you've been working with torture victims.

BAMBER: I think that in some countries torture has been, if you can bear the word, refined. And there have been subtle and clever ways of maximizing pain by leaving very few signs. Electricity, for example, the use of electricity on the sensitive parts of the body: the eyelids, the earlobes, the genitalia; have been described as the universal tool of the torturer.

It's economical, it leaves few signs. And there are other methods too; using pharmacology, which leaves few signs. However, we still see the grotesque and very brutal injuries that result from torture where people are not so interested in leaving few signs.

GROSS: Are they are typical physical problems that the doctors who work with you have to treat?

BAMBER: There are many, many physical problems. There are problems with backs, with limbs, with eyesight, hearing, teeth, crushed fingers and feet. The beating of the soles of the feet is a very typical, again, almost universal form of torture which is excruciating. And people suffer, again, with few obvious signs, but suffer paint for many years following sustained beating of the soles of their feet.

We only have to tread on something, you know, without our shoes to know how painful it is on our bare if we imagine what it's like to have sustained beatings over many hours, perhaps, or days on and off. We can imagine what that does.

GROSS: For someone who has been tortured, the body has been the source of tremendous suffering. And I'm wondering if a lot of torture victims are left with great feelings of alienation toward their own body or feelings of fear about their own bodies.

BAMBER: I think that's a very interesting point that you bring up. I think that in the process of torture, in order to survive torture, you have to almost discard your body. You have to -- and I -- this is very difficult to explain over the air. One of the captors -- one of the hostages, British hostages, Brian Keenan, explains it very well in his book, "An Evil Cradling."

He said that when he was being beaten he actually saw his body over the other side of the room because it's a humiliated degraded body. It's a body that actually betrays you in the end. It urinates, it defecates under the process of torture. And therefore in order to survive you discard it.

Our job, really, if we're looking at the physical effects of torture, is to try to obviously to repair the damage, and that can be done in many cases. But also to honor in the way we approach our people, in the way we use our physical therapies to honor the body again. To enable somebody to accept their -- themselves as whole.

Torture fragments in some mad way, it fragments, and it's necessary to help people to come together as a whole person. And that's why the treatment has to be towards the whole person. You can't just treat a limb, however severely damaged it is.

You have to treat the whole person as well looking at all the deeper psychological implications of that damaged limb, what it means.

GROSS: I'm wondering if a lot of torture victims also have to deal with a lot of guilt, particularly people who perhaps have confessed to something under torture or who have named names under torture or who know that their children were forced to watch while they were tortured. So somehow their torture has, you know, emotionally disturbed their children. You know, not through anything that they did but still...

BAMBER: Oh, absolutely. It is the helplessness of torture that produces so much guilt. And people have said that it's not the torture of their own body that upsets them so much, it's having witnessed their friends, their relatives, their children. And being helpless in the face of that, being unable to come to their aid.

And this is a difficult area of work because it means working with families, with children, with wives and with husbands who come back changed in some way in order to reframe their relationships. Now, these are words which sound rather trite, I know, but it's possible to do that. It's possible to do that creatively.

But it does often take time, and it would be foolish of me to pretend that one succeeds in every case. One doesn't.

GROSS: It's my impression from the reading I've done over the years that often in state-sponsored torture the torturers make it seem like, well, look, this can all stop if you just cooperate. If you just name names or confess to the crime that we've charged you with.

Have you found in your experience with torture victims that if the victim cooperates with the state that the state keeps its word and stops the torture and releases the victim?

BAMBER: No. It often kills them. And people will often say anything under torture, you know. And by that I don't mean they'll confess to anything. But they may give names that they remember from the past. They will try -- inevitably they will try not to give names that are wanted.

But, you know, there's another aspect to torture, and that's just about political control. It's not only about getting names, it's just about controlling a population by terror.

And people know that if they deviate in some way, if a teacher deviates in her school with her pupils, or the pupils play the wrong music or drink some alcohol, which is not the greatest crime in the world; you know, they may be taken and tortured. It's a terrible form of tyranny and political control. We have to understand it better if we're to prevent it.

GROSS: My guest is Helen Bamber, the founder and director of The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guest is Helen Bamber. And she's the founder and director of The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which is based in England. There's also a new book about her called "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, a Life against Cruelty."

You know, you've said about your work that after somebody has been tortured that there is this incredible anger that they usually have, and a very deep need to keep telling the story of what happened to them over and over. And often people kind of dwell on that experience.

And I'm wondering if you have kind of found a balance in your work between helping the person who is dwelling on that experience, like focus on it in a way that would be helpful for them. But then at some point saying, now it's time to move on. Is there ever that point where you say now it's time to move on and stop dwelling on the past?

BAMBER: I've never used that phrase. I have never found that to be helpful. I think you can only enable somebody to move forward. They have to do the work. You can't say it for them. You can't, as it were, push them forward. They have to be ready to move forward and it's entirely a relationship between you and them in the moving forward.

And it can be a very difficult relationship sometimes in which both of you are challenged. Not everybody wants to tell their story. Some people do and don't say it all, and it's often the bit that they can't say that is the bit that you have to wait for that comes up later.

Other's -- others hardly can bear to think about it or tell their story. And you have to find ways to approach that. We found -- this may sound really quite unusual perhaps, but we have quite a large number of African women. Most of them -- from various African countries -- most of them have lost their husbands, their children and they've witnessed terrible atrocity. Many of them have been raped. Some have been mutilated.

And they live in lonely corners in rather miserable bedsits in London. And we found it very difficult to find ways to encourage people to come into The Foundation, and as it were, to try to find a way to a more qualitative life for them. And in the end we offered a group for cooking, for buying African food and cooking African food and sitting around a table with the two facilitators.

And a group of women cooking, eating and telling fables. And the use of storytelling and fables can be a very creative way of beginning the process of telling and sharing. And so the women came together, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes quite enthusiastically.

You know, the smell of peanuts -- peanut soup is very compelling in the foundation sometimes. And it was a very wonderful group, but also it was a group that contained grief and anger and envy about women they'd seen in the street with a child holding their hands.

And all of this came out through, if you like, a process of sitting around a table eating traditional food, telling stories. And out of it came something to do with healing in the end.

GROSS: Are there new approaches that you feel the doctors you've worked with have helped create in helping torture victims heal psychologically?

BAMBER: I think one of the most important things that we have understood almost from the beginning is that it's extremely important not to medicalize the issue of torture. Torture is not a disease. It's a disease of the perpetrators, but it's not a disease.

It creates havoc, but it affects people differently. And so it's an individual process, and it's very important to try to find a language that describes very severe suffering and grief without using medical terms for it. Without constantly talking about the post traumatic stress disorder, which we all have to use from time to time.

But it's important to talk in terms of suffering, and how you treat that. That's what it's about very often. With the physical symptoms that we've already described, of course it's much simpler. But there is a tendency for people to make torture into a medical issue with terminology, and we try to avoid that if we can. It's not helpful to the person you're trying to work with.

GROSS: Do you find that it's safer for torture victims to confide in you and in the doctors you work with because you're professionals and you know how to handle this, than it is for the victim to confided their own family. Because if their family didn't witness the torture they'd be left with nightmarish visions about someone they loved that -- that the torture victim might want to protect them from?

BAMBER: Yes, I think you're absolutely right. A torture victim does not protect his family. There is a fear in many people who've been tortured that somehow the very fact that they've been assaulted in such a dreadful way is that they will -- that they will almost contaminate somebody with the telling.

And it's -- it is, I think, often easier for them to begin to talk about their experiences with the people in The Foundation. On the other hand, by not telling within the family, by withholding much you are also creating secrets within the family. And that's very difficult for a family to bear, particularly for children.

And you have to strike a balance sometimes when you're doing family work, and work with children, as to how much you explain about what has happened within the family group. That means working with the family and with yourself there, and perhaps another facilitator there.

And trying to work with an understanding that somebody has been hurt, and that it's difficult for them to express themselves. It's not that they don't love their children, but it's very difficult for them to express love when they've been so badly hurt.

And this very often, again, complex, difficult, but it's important. So, you mustn't be the elevated therapist receiving all the information. You have to encourage some secrets. Not all, but some secrets to be told.

GROSS: Your group has worked with thousands of survivors of torture. One of the big controversies now in states which have become emerging democracies after being dictatorships, is whether the people behind state-sponsored torture should be given amnesty or should be punished.

You know, whether it's time for the society to just move on, or whether they should, you know, look back to the past and punish the perpetrators of torture and other crimes against humanity. And I'm wondering what your opinion of that is, and that might differ from country to country.

BAMBER: No, I think that it's very important for people to be brought to justice, and to be seen to be brought to justice. I don't think that a society can be a healthy society or can move on...

GROSS: Well, let me stop you here. In some places the idea is that there should be a truth commission, and in return for telling the truth, in return for giving a truthful documentation of what happened for the sake of history and for the sake of the survivors, that amnesty would be given.

BAMBER: Well, that was possible in South Africa. And I think that it has had quite an effect in that country. But it was not possible in Chile, because Pinochet had written his own amnesty. And it was not possible to bring him or to bring him to face the truth or for him to talk about the truth.

And I think it was very important for those Chileans, and I know them well. We've been working with some of them for 20-odd years, more than that. And we're still looking at some of the physical incapacitates that they carry from torture -- dreadful torture.

So, I think it was important in the case of Pinochet to try to bring some justice to those who had suffered so much. I also think that it's, you know, each country has to find its way to move forward. But you can't move forward by sweeping it under the carpet. It won't go away.

There are people who are still searching for disappeared members of their family; 50 years on in the case of the Holocaust and others, and 20 years on in terms of countries in Latin America. That isn't a healthy society. That doesn't make life good and proper.

GROSS: Helen Bamber is the founder and director of The London-based group, The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. The new book about her is called "The Good Listener: a Life against Cruelty" by Neil Belton. Bamber will be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with Helen Bamber. She is the founder and director of the London-based group, The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Her group works with victims of state-sponsored torture from around the world. There's a new book about her called "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, a Life against Cruelty."

This book about you is in a way an attempt to understand why someone such as you would devote your life to helping torture victims, which is, you know, a very grim occupation in many ways. And I'd like to ask you a few questions about your childhood and some of the things you were exposed to when you were young.

Your parents were Jewish refugees from Poland, and according to the book while you were growing up in the '30s and '40s your father read to you from Hitler's "Mien Kampf," and from articles by Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Why did he read this kind of material to you when you were so young?

BAMBER: Mmm. It's a very good question. They were not themselves Polish refugees, their parents had been -- in fact, my father was born in New York, believe it or not. It's my first time seeing New York, so it's an interesting visit for me.

And then he -- they went back to Poland and then came to the United Kingdom. I think that my father was something of a strange visionary. He had a vision of the Holocaust. He watched Fascism grow not only in Europe, but in the United Kingdom and in America too -- throughout Europe. And he was fearful.

And I was an only child, and I don't think that my father actually thought of me as a child. He thought of me as a grown-up person, and so he, not getting on with my mother, not communicating with her, he would communicate with me. And he would, as you quite rightly say, read Goebbels and listen to Hitler's broadcasts. He spoke perfect German. He was a good linguistic, and he was bilingual in German and English.

And he would translate. I would sit at the top of the stairs and I'd be terrified. And he would -- and just the voice of Hitler alone screaming and ranting and then watching Fascists in London marching through the streets at the East End in North London was a terrifying site for a child.

Maybe I was more affected than many others. And the violence didn't attract me. There was much violence in those days, actually, in the streets of London. It terrified me, and I felt a potential victim. And I suppose that is the basis, really, of my preoccupation. I sensed very early on what it was to experience fear and be fearful of being a victim of violence from the Nazis.

GROSS: Well, as an adult you were able to turn that fear into very important work. What about as a kid? I mean, before you were able to help other people and use that fear in a productive way. How did that fear affect you?

BAMBER: Well, it dominated my life to a point, although there was a period when I was able to turn it around in my early teens before the war. When a group of kids got together -- Jewish kids got together in the sort of area where I lived in North London. It's a very poor district. And there were many, many marches there.

And we decided that we were going to try and do something about this, and we were only kids. And we threw stones and we chanted and we were chased very often down the streets. We became quite vigorous and we actually felt a lot better, which explains something about opposition and why people become, if you like, militant.

We became quite active, and sometimes not unsuccessful in this. But I was always fearful at the same time.

GROSS: Were you in London during the bombing?

BAMBER: I was in London during the bombing. And curiously enough, I've often wondered at my reaction. I really wasn't afraid in the bombing. And it's because I didn't feel personally sought out for atrocity.

If a bomb felt it would fall randomly, and I might be lucky or not. And I wasn't totally lucky. I was in a bombing incident which has had its effect on me. But at the same time I felt much safer, and I was, with the whole population, taking my chances. Nobody was sort of seeking me out personally.

GROSS: That's a really interesting distinction that you're making.

BAMBER: Yes. I know. And I wasn't afraid. And I would take part in fire watching, and that's the reason why I was involved in an incident.

GROSS: What was the incident?

BAMBER: Well, the incident -- I was fire watching in -- at night in a district of London, Hoburn (ph), the center of London in a solicitor's office. And I was standing on some steps which led down to the basement of this -- the offices; very old-fashioned buildings where all the documents were kept.

And some wooden steps, and the steps -- as there was a bomb very close, the steps collapsed under me. And that was quite a frightening experience altogether, actually. That was really quite terrifying, and the thing that I remember more than anything else about that is the dust.

This dust in your lungs and in your mouth and in your eyes and in your hair, and the difficulty of getting it out again. And somehow even now occasionally I sense that feeling of the dust in my lungs. Strange, but I wasn't really afraid.

GROSS: Were you hurt in that incident?

BAMBER: I was a bit bruised, oh, yes. I was, but not drastically, no.

GROSS: Mmm-hmm.

BAMBER: No, I wasn't.

GROSS: My guest is Helen Bamber, the founder and director of The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Helen Bamber. And she is the founder and director of The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which works with torture victims. Her group is based in England. There's a new book about her called "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life against Cruelty."

Right at the end of the war you volunteered to work with the Jewish relief services and went to the concentration camp Belsen shortly after it was liberated. I think this was in 1945?

BAMBER: Yes.

GROSS: And you were how old?

BAMBER: I began to train to go there when I was 19, and I was just 20 when I went.

GROSS: Would you describe the scene when you arrived at Belsen.

BAMBER: Well, I have to tell you, we didn't -- we didn't go in immediately. So, that I wasn't confronted with the scene that we're all used to on our television screens and our cinema screens of dead bodies being scooped up.

What we were confronted with was something rather different. It was people who were beginning to remember, who were still emaciated and desperately ill. Some were dying. Our nurses and doctors worked in the hospital in Belsen, and that was quite a devastating experience for all of us really to see.

But I think that -- I suppose what always stays in my mind most is my own sense of inadequacy at the beginning when I was confronted by people who hardly seemed human, who held you very tightly with very thin arms and fingers. And dug their fingers into your flesh and tried to tell you in a rasping voice.

And I've often described it, really more as a vomit than a voice. It sort of vomited out of them -- dreadful information. And also the need to try to find their lost relatives. And that was a constructive piece of work that we could do there. We could in fact try to help people that we had set up a search -- Belsen became a sort of teaming mass of people who were looking for their relatives.

I ought to just mention that contrary to general opinion, people didn't just come out of the camp when it was liberated. There was nowhere for them to go. They remained there for several years, and they began to recover slowly and with our help, I think.

And I think one of the things that we were able to do there was to work with them to produce, again, looking at resilience and strengths rather than just at the horror. We began to encourage them to form committees and spokespeople, because they had many needs.

Their greatest need of course was to emigrate. They wanted to come either to the UK or to the USA, and of course they couldn't. Some could, but very few. They couldn't go back to the countries where they'd come from.

When they tried to do that and going back to Poland, they were turned upon. Their homes had been taken over by Polish people. And several people were killed. And they were driven out again of the villages, and they tramped back into Germany and arrived back into the camps.

And they were quite a few camps. Not only Belsen, but Belsen was the central place where people came to.

GROSS: Does this mean that you lived in the camp too while taking care of survivors?

BAMBER: Yes. I mean, I stayed there. It was my only job in Germany, by the way. It wasn't my main task, which developed later when I was there. But when I was working in Belsen I stayed with my team there during a very cold period of the winter, which I don't think I took my clothes off very much.

GROSS: It must have been pretty disturbing to live in a former concentration camp so shortly after the camp was liberated.

BAMBER: Yes, it was very disturbing. But then the whole scene was very disturbing. It was disturbing for many reasons. It was disturbing because of the people who were there -- our own sense of inadequacy. But it was also disturbing to see people's attitudes change, because when the camp was first liberated there was much compassion and horror and outrage at what they found there.

But over time, this again is the difficulty of helping people to get better. Because as they got better they became more vocal. They became more articulate. The asked for things from the military government who was in control of the camp. And they became, in fact, a nuisance.

So, they changed from being creatures for compassion to being irritating people -- displaced persons who had nowhere to go. And that I found very frightening as a young person, watching those attitudes change. That frightened me. And I'm always frightened by that, by people's capacity to deny the truth. That preoccupies me.

GROSS: Well, you say in the book that one of the patterns that emerged were that some of the survivors, once they were able to really articulate again, were very angry and they needed to tell their stories over and over again. But the survivors eventually even got angry at relief workers, workers like you.

I mean, how did that anger manifest itself against you sometimes?

BAMBER: Anger has to be understood as part of the -- as part of something that is quite normal. It's something we see quite frequently in The Medical Foundation. And I think The Medical Foundation has become a safe place for people where they can express their grief and their anger. But we mustn't deny the anger. Anger is there, and it's almost healthy to be angry.

However, there -- you have to know when to make boundaries. I was myself attacked quite savagely on one occasion by somebody whose frustration I think could be contained no longer, and he really did attack me quite savagely.

GROSS: Verbally or physically?

BAMBER: Physically. And this happens not very often, but it's not surprising that it does. I think one has to ask oneself perhaps put it the other way around. Isn't it strange that it didn't happen more often?

GROSS: Helen Bamber is my guest. And she's the founder and director of The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in England. And there's a new book about her called "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, a Life against Cruelty."

Well, after you worked in Germany you returned to England in, I think, 1950 and worked with orphans who had survived the death camps. And then eventually you worked with Amnesty International, joining its executive council in England. And then you set up The Medical Foundation for the Cure of Victims of Torture.

Now, along the way you married, I believe, a Jewish refugee who had lost his family in the Holocaust. And I'm wondering what -- if you feel that there are things you learned from that marriage that you now apply to your work and to your understanding of people who have survived wars, survived torture.

BAMBER: Yes, it's a very sad realization, really, looking back. It's the realization that people very often cannot communicate their feelings to you. They cannot communicate what has happened to them. What happened to my husband's mother was dreadful.

He'd seen his father beaten to death on the night of the Kristallnacht. And his entire family, except his sister, went to Majdanek concentration camp and were destroyed. I think a marriage really -- you -- a marriage needs a lot of nourishment and love and understanding.

And I think that it's only now looking back that I understand how much my husband had suffered and how inarticulate he was about it. And how it dominated his life. And how he carried quite a lot of anger, unrequited anger and misery with him.

And that, I think, has helped me to understand other families now that I'm working with in The Foundation that the silences and the secrets that we keep from our children can be dangerous. When my sons asked how did their grandmother die, was she -- and their grandfather die -- were they shot. I remember we said yes. Which of course was a lie.

Now, it may not have been such a dreadful lie at the time, but it was a lie. It's the difficulty of when to tell your children, how to tell them, when are they old enough to accept the truth. And then to realize that they're quite angry with you later on because you haven't actually told them the truth.

And yet, they weren't ready for it when they were very young. So, it's a bit of a -- it's a bit of a circle, that one. And I've learned a lot from that. I've learned how to look at families where such silences and secrets exist.

GROSS: Helen Bamber, I thank you very much for talking with us.

BAMBER: Thank you.

GROSS: Helen Bamber is the founder and director of The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which is based in London. The new book about her is called "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, a Life against Cruelty" by Neil Belton.

This is FRESH AIR.

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TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, D.C.
Guest: Helen Bamber
High: Helen Bamber is the founder and director of the London-based Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. A biography "The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty" by Neil Belton has just been published. When Helen Bamber was a little girl growing up in 1930s England, her father read her sections of "Mien Kampf" to inure her to the evil in the world. In 1945, at the age of 19, she traveled to the former concentration camp at Belsen to help with the physical and psychological recovery of Holocaust survivors. This was only the beginning, later in life, she became a leader in Amnesty International, and in 1985, she founded the Foundation. Bamber is now in her 70s.
Spec: Human Rights; Violence; Lifestyle; Culture; Helen Bamber

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Helen Bamber's Crusade for Torture Victims

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JULY 08, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 070802NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Review of a Documentary on Wanda Landowska
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:50

TERRY GROSS, HOST: For hundreds of years after the death of Bach the harpsichord was a forgotten instrument. We owe the 20th-century rediscovery mainly to one person, the Polish-Jewish prodigy Wanda Landowska. A new documentary about her is airing on PBS.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz has a review.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- HARPSICHORD MUSIC PERFORMED BY WANDA LANDOWSKA)

LLOYD SCHWARTZ, CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC: On a recent cover of "The New Yorker," there was a witty Bruce McCall (ph) cartoon of Time's Square depicted as if high culture were pop culture. "Dutch Documentary Festival," reads one marquee. "Thousands of Adult Librettos," another sign says. And the most contiguous billboard reads with double exclamation points, "World's Hottest Harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska."

Producer-Director Barbara Attie has put together a delightful documentary on the life of this fascinating musical personality. It was Landowska who had the wild idea before the turn of the century of playing Bach on the instrument he wrote for. Pianists, probably threatened by this notion, thought it was ridiculous, but as Landowska herself put it in her one televised interview, much of which is included in the new documentary, "harpsichord players have been sprouting like mushrooms."

Even modern composers took it up. Both Manuel De Falla and Francis Poulenc wrote brilliant harpsichord concertos for Landowska. William Buckley, who lived near her in Connecticut and got to know her when he went to her house to seek advice about is out of commission clavichord, gets it right when he calls her "a mixture of priestess and someone making fun herself." Both her wit and her passion emerge in that 1953 interview.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- INTERVIEW FEATURING HARPSICHORDIST WANDA LANDOWSKA)

WANDA LANDOWSKA, HARPSICHORDIST: If I wouldn't be in love with my music what could I do? Nothing. And this is the most important, people who have nothing in their insides, in their soul, they are fools. But a man or a woman who has, who has a conviction that something is beautiful, that something is profound, it helps him to overcome his grief.

SCHWARTZ: Landowska was born in Warsaw in 1879 to well-to-do and culturally minded Jewish parents. She wrote in her diary of her mad desire to be famous. She went to study in Berlin, but found music lessons tedious and useless.

Countess Tolstoy heard her play and wanted Landowska to come to Russia so her husband could hear her. She visited Tolstoy and played for him every afternoon. "Tolstoy was the most musical human being I have never met," she says in the interview. "Imagine this experience to discover for this man a new- old instrument, and new-old music. This was more than marvelous."

In 1912, she got the Playel (ph) Piano Company in Paris to build her the peculiar hybrid instrument she always used. A kind of grand harpsichord with piano construction: louder, more sonorous than any harpsichord Bach would have known.

Even early in her career she was criticized for her romantic approach to baroque music and praised for her fearlessness. Virgil Thompson, writing for the "New York Herald Tribune," was rightly enthralled by the unique grandeur of her rhythm.

This documentary, though, concentrates more on Landowska's life than on the quality of her music making. It touches lightly on her feud with her former pupil, Ralph Kirkpatrick. And on her unorthodox marriage and the woman who was a companion both to Landowska herself and to her husband.

There are also interviews with Landowska later companion, Denise Restout, who tells numerous anecdotes some delightful, some concerning the Nazi invasion of Paris, quite terrifying. Here are Landowska and then Restout talking about the remarkable Scarlotti (ph) recordings Landowska made in Paris in 1940.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- INTERVIEW FEATURING HARPSICHORDIST WANDA LANDOWSKA)

LANDOWSKA: While I was playing one of them it made a loud sound of (unintelligible). Soon to be followed by anti-aircraft guns fired at enemy planes. But this dramatic atmosphere inspired me to go on.

DENISE RASTEU, LANDOWSKA'S COMPANION: She didn't stop, she just went on playing. During one of the recordings you can hear very clearly the guns shouting at a foreign plane. And they have kept that scenario with the gunshot in it because it's a document of the time.

SCHWARTZ: For all the drama of Landowska's life though, the greatest drama was in her playing. My one complaint about the documentary is how little of Landowska's playing we actually get to listen to that isn't just background music. What would Landowska herself have thought about people talking while she was engaging in her sacred art?

On the home video version, there's an extra six minutes that includes all the footage of Landowska playing the harpsichord for the 1953 interview. It's too bad the main reason we need to remember Landowska couldn't find more of its way on to public television.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of the "Boston Phoenix." He reviewed the documentary "Landowska: Uncommon Visionary," that airs in Los Angeles tonight and on other PBS stations throughout July. The documentary is available on home video on the VAI label.

I'm Terry Gross.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, D.C.
Guest: Lloyd Schwartz
High: Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a PBS documentary on harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.
Spec: Entertainment; Music Industry; Television and Radio; Lifestyle; Culture; Wanda Landowska; Lloyd Schwartz

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Review of a Documentary on Wanda Landowska
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