She died childless, he saves children: abused Nepali boys and girls rescued by British ex-soldier’s charity
- Helping children in Nepal was British Army officer Philip Holmes’ way of honouring his wife, who committed suicide in large part because she was childless
- The charity he founded rescued children from jails and circuses, and won child-protection-law changes. His new quest is even tougher: helping child-rape victims
MEETING ESTHER We met, by chance, on a ski lift in Austria, in 1985. The first word that springs to mind about her is “intriguing”.
I was 25 and a dentist in the British Army, stationed in Germany. Esther was a Dutch-Jewish lady. She was a social worker in Holland, working with survivors of the concentration camps and their families.
People would open up to her and tell her all these things about Auschwitz and Treblinka that they couldn’t tell anyone else. From that, she developed an interest in social justice and she began studying law in her spare time. She got her master’s in law in 1988, the year we got married.
After she died, in 1999, one of her friends told me, “She chose you”, and she’d made that very clear. In some ways, because of the army, we hadn’t seen that much of each other before we got married. But it worked extremely well, with the one exception of not having any children. That was a large part of the reason why she took her own life.
DUTY BOUND If you’re in that situation of finding your wife’s body, you either fold or focus. I stayed in total self-control. Maybe it’s a Northern Irish Presbyterian upbringing, which is pretty buttoned-up. And after 17 years in the army, you get on with it, you do your duty and what’s expected of you. Those were Esther’s values, too.
