Camilla Carr, free-spirited aid worker who forgave those who kidnapped and raped her in Chechnya

She and her partner coped with their 14 months in captivity by practising meditation, yoga and tai chi

Camilla Carr, who has died after a long illness aged 66, travelled to the Russian republic of Chechnya in 1997 with her partner Jon James to set up a rehabilitation centre for children traumatised by the first Chechen War (1994-96). While there, they were kidnapped and held hostage for 14 months. 
In 2008 they published The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya, describing their ordeal and their struggle to adjust to normal life afterwards. 
A key to their recovery was a willingness to forgive, and Camilla Carr gave many talks for the Forgiveness Project, founded in 2004 to share stories from victims, survivors and perpetrators of crime and conflict who have rebuilt their lives. She also gave talks on survival to companies whose employees work in hostile environments.
Although the first war in Chechnya had ended by 1997, the country remained extremely dangerous. The couple were warned that anyone going there risked kidnap, and yet, as Camilla Carr recalled: “I felt it was our destiny. We were following our hearts.” 
The pair were shockingly ill-prepared, however, on April 16 when they set off in a £500 second-hand Lada full of toys and games on their 2,000-mile journey to Grozny via Moscow. They spoke no Russian or Chechen and had no experience of working in a war zone, but had agreed to help after meeting Christopher Hunter, a Quaker friend who ran the Little Star charity, helping children who had been orphaned and traumatised in the war, and who wanted help to set up and run a permanent centre in Grozny. 
“The only way I can describe my reaction was an amazing physical feeling that made me say yes,” Camilla Carr recalled. “I could see in Jon’s eyes that his reaction was the same. It was decided in that minute.”
Until their departure Camilla Carr had been working as an administrative assistant in a community centre in Ross-on-Wye, running play schemes for children. In Chechnya she offered drama, art, and therapeutic games to help war orphans. 
But despite the presence of two bodyguards, on July 2, less than two months after their arrival, masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the couple’s house on the outskirts of Grozny in the early hours and took them, handcuffed and blindfolded, to a building where they were bundled through a trap door into a dank cellar – the first of 14 prisons that they would occupy in the following 443 days. 
As their captors placed a £1 million ransom on their heads and family and friends in England, led by Camilla’s sister Alexandra, launched a campaign for their release, they were moved from cellars with no sanitation or daylight to gaudy pink bedrooms in private homes. They went weeks at a time without hot water, subsisting mainly on watery soup and stale bread.
As Camilla later recalled: “As soon as we were taken hostage we decided to take the line of least resistance, because our captors were so clearly traumatised by the war. If we’d shown anger or sadness, or resisted them in any way, we knew they could have reacted with violence.”
The couple tried to build up a rapport with their captors. Using a Russian-English dictionary, they listened to stories of how the war had wrecked ordinary lives and how kidnapping was the only way to generate an income.
Sometimes the kidnappers would become aggressive, accusing them of working for Mossad or the CIA and subjecting them to beatings. They threatened to cut off Jon James’s fingers, and on one occasion pointed a Kalashnikov at his chest: “The guy pulled the catch on the gun back, but it jammed,” Camilla recalled. “They laughed and that broke the tension.”
The worst moments were the repeated rapes of Camilla by a guard they nicknamed Paunch. The man would chain Jon to a radiator and then drag Camilla into another room and rape her. Afterwards, he would insist that Jon played him at backgammon. Camilla got through it by telling herself: “You can never touch the essence of me. My body is only part of who I am.”
After six weeks of being raped, she found an opportunity to object: “For the first time there was an open door and the others were there, which gave me the strength to kneel away from him and say, ‘Niet, niet.’ He looked surprised and asked me to get the dictionary. I pointed out, ‘No sex, no violence.’ He said, ‘But you Western woman, free sex.’ 
“Then it was like a light switched on in his brain and I realised he wanted me as a friend. In his own way he was apologising. He never touched me again after that but talked about his dreams of having a market garden and a four-wheel drive… I really respected that he did not try it again. That gave me the opportunity to begin to forgive him.”
Towards the end of their captivity, the couple were forced to share a cramped cell with another prisoner, a Russian who, it transpired, had been a special envoy for Boris Yeltsin.
They had no idea they were to be freed until, one day in September 1998, a guard came and bundled them into a car. An hour later, they were across the border into Ingushetia and taken to a five-star hotel. After a bath they travelled on to Moscow, where they were joined by the billionaire Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who offered his private jet for their onward journey. Though Berezovsky was credited with playing a vital role in their release, any payment of a ransom was officially denied. 
On September 20 1998 they touched down at RAF Brize Norton, Camilla amazing well-wishers with her fortitude as she stepped off the plane and confidently thanked everyone.But she and Jon struggled to adjust to their new-found freedom. “At first we were sustained by the love and joy that greeted us in Britain, “Camilla recalled. “Then, after six weeks, I had no energy left and would just lie and weep.”
They married in 1999, but it was not until 2001, when they moved to Snowdonia to work at a yoga centre, that Camilla found, as she put it, “the space and silence to let go and surrender to weakness and vulnerability. ”
Later they moved to Bath and then to a small rented cottage on Dartmoor, where Jon worked as an odd-job man and part-time tree surgeon while Camilla gave talks about survivorship and trained as a drama therapist.
Forgiveness she regarded as key: “You have to understand where the perpetrators are coming from,” she said. “We knew what these guys had been through, and how they had been fighting for two years. They had lost their livelihood, their families; they were traumatised.
“The thing that makes me angry is that this is what comes of war, it creates unstable minds.”
One of three children, Camilla Mary Carr was born on January 31 1958 in Sharfoldendorf, Germany, where her father, Squadron Leader Philip Carr, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, was stationed with the RAF.
Her mother Heather (who later changed her name to Helen), née Wilson, was a potter and artist who had studied at the Slade and was descended from Thomas Cobbe, a 19th-century British Army officer who married an Indian princess from Udaipur and died on his journey home, leaving her with 10 children.
Camilla grew up in Wellington, Shropshire, where her father worked as bursar of Wrekin College after retiring from the RAF, and where her mother taught art and pottery.
In an interview with The Independent during her later captivity her brother-in-law David Little described Camilla’s family as ranging from “complete free spirits to people with their feet on the ground”. Her mother Helen supplied the bohemian strain, and she and her daughter shared an interest in spiritual healing and Sufism. 
From Shrewsbury High School, Camilla went on to Homerton College, the teacher-training college in Cambridge where she studied art and participated in Footlights productions. 
She began her career teaching art at a prep school in Wellington before moving for a few years to Amsterdam, where she indulged her passion for acting, singing and dancing, and putting on avant-garde plays. 
On a trip to Australia she met Marcel Weiffenbach, a Dutch man with whom she had a son, Ashok. They lived together in Britain for about six years before they separated, and although Ashok went to live with his father, all three remained close. 
Meanwhile Camilla developed a reputation as a sculptor, and for a time lived in London working for a garden products company making ornamental sculptures such as geese and sundials. 
In the early 1990s she moved to Ross-on-Wye, where in 1994 she met Jon James, a builder who worked with disabled adults and who, she found, shared her passion for yoga and tai chi:. “The following summer, Jon suddenly said, ‘Shall we dance the road of life together for a while?’ ” 
During their captivity it was the structure they gave to their days through practising meditation, yoga and tai chi, as well as playing games and telling stories, that helped them to survive their ordeal. 
Camilla Carr is survived by her husband and son.
Camilla Carr, born January 31 1958, died August 22 2024