A Holocaust survivor is going viral on TikTok and her name is Lily Ebert. This article covers her story details on her family and about her mission to share her stories with the world.
Scroll down this Lily Ebert Bio and learn more about her husband, Family, her story.
Lily Ebert On TikTok
Lily Ebert promised herself that she ever came out of Auschwitz, she would do something that would change everything. To avoid the hellish life she had lived, she vowed to share her stories with the world. “I had to make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again to anybody. So I promised myself I would tell the world what had happened. Not just to me, but to all the people who could not tell their stories.”
She started by authoring an autobiography. But, going viral on TikTok while amassing a staggering 1.6 million followers, she became probably the oldest influencer on the social media platform.
Lily and her great grand-son Dov Forman started making TikToks during the time of the pandemic. He told his great-grandma if people could go viral for dancing, why can’t they go viral for sharing these important messages. In One TikTok she shared, “In Auschwitz, you were not afraid of death, you were afraid of life.”
Their content attracts nearly 1 million views on their platforms per day. “You can see I am not a youngster anymore. I learn from young people and I am so happy,” Lily told during her interview with The Times of Israel. “I was afraid that [this work] would finish with our generation but luckily I see it won’t finish. The youngsters will take over and they will, I hope, learn from it.”
She went viral largely by sharing her stories of the holocaust and Nazi death camps. In another TikTok, she shared, “Our dinner that was only a very small piece of bread.”
Furthermore, her TikTok where Lily revealed her prisoner number “A-10572” alone gathered more than 20 million views. She added “That is what I was they did not call us by our name. We were no longer humans.”
But one storyline, in particular, intrigued the followers. After Auschwitz was liberated she got talking to American G.I. who wrote a message on a German banknote. He wrote, “Good Life, Good Luck For Your Future.” So, her great-grandson started thinking that he might be able to find the person who wrote the message for her within 24 hours.
But, it took less than that. Within 8 hours of posting the video, an hour later they had managed to find the soldier private Hy Schulman. He had died in 2013 but they set up a zoom call with their son Jason. Jason also shared his story with CBS Morning and initially thought it was a scam.
Yet, when he looked at the banknote and in Hebrew lettering, he recognized his father’s name. That little note from the soldier helped restore the humanity she had lost a while back.
Aside from Twitter, where their posts average about a million views each, Ebert is to be the first Holocaust survivor to appear on the gaming platform Twitch. Their TikTok live talks instantly amass around 5,000 viewers. There are Lily jokes, “no limit” to their potential reach.
Lily Ebert Story
Lily Ebert came from Bonyhád, the small, busy market town in southwest Hungary where she lived with her parents and her five brothers (Imi and Bela), and three sisters (Piri, Berta, and Rene). In the book that she co-authored, Lily described her parents — “kind, calm, loving, and very lenient indeed” — provided a “kind of cocoon”. She and her siblings, “so safe and protected from the evils of the world, we didn’t even know evil existed.”
There were plenty of Jewish population in her town but knew nothing about the antisemitic laws introduced by Admiral Miklós Horthy’s authoritarian regime before World War II, nor about the growing power of the fascist Arrow Cross Party. Even the outbreak of war in 1939 barely seemed to register.
Her father died from pneumonia in 1942 which was the start of the family’s nightmare. Shortly before he died, Lily had promised her father that she would look after her siblings.
Two years later in March 1944, Nazi-occupied Hungary. In June 1944, while her brother Imi was dragged into the Jewish labor battalion, Lily and her siblings and their mother began their journey to Auschwitz. After the arrival, Lily and her sisters Rene and Piri, separated from their mother, brother, and sister, Béla and Berta whom they never saw again.
“I knew that as long as we were in this place, I could not take my eyes off my sisters. I had to look after them I was the one thing they could trust, the only point of stability.”
SS guard at a selection picked out Rene and ordered her to follow him. Lily instantly took her hand and pulled her younger sister into the lineup. The guard, accustomed to obedience, didn’t even notice the sisters’ act. The sister’s ordeal came to an end in April 1945, on a death march, the SS guards abruptly abandoned them in a village in Saxony close to the Czech border. Within minutes, United States Army tanks and jeeps appeared.
As the war ended, Lily and her sisters were moved to Buchenwald, now under US control and operating as displaced person’s camp. They slept in one of the houses previously occupied by SS guards, although the sight of soup being served up in the same communal containers used at Auschwitz brought “a terrible feeling,” with all three sisters “overwhelmed with images and memories we couldn’t control.”
They arrived in Switzerland but their hellish situation kept on haunting. The promise she had made to herself to share her story was crushed because nobody was listening. Since they felt that Europe wasn’t safe for Jews, Lily and her sisters emigrated to Palestine with the help of Agudat Yisrael in June 1946.
Who Is Lily Ebert Husband?
Deflecting from Switzerland and after arriving in Palestine, Lily Ebert met her husband Shmuel. They married 12 days after Israel declared independence in 1948. The marriage brought Lily security and by the end of 1957, she had her third child. Her husband was also Hungarian who had arrived in Palestine in 1938.
Lily never shared her stories with anyone, even her husband. And Shmuel thought it best not to upset by asking her the stories. Lily shared about her husband, “A warm-hearted and generous man, he imagined that talking and remembering would only cause me pain.”
Sadly, Lily lost her beloved husband in the mid-1980s. She had written in her book, “All the grief I had kept inside since Auschwitz-Birkenau finally escaped, heaped on top of my agony at losing Shmuel”.
Lily was the mother of three children, ten grandchildren, and 34 great-grandchildren.
Lily Ebert Family, Sisters
As already stated, Lily Ebert lost her father to pneumonia in 1942. Her brother, Imi, was forced to join Jewish labor battalions. She and her sisters Piri and Rene, separated with their mother and their two siblings Bela and Berta while at Auschwitz, who they never saw again. Her sisters were with her after the war ended and came to emigrated to Palestine.
In 1953, she was reunited with Imi, one of her two brothers, who had been imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp. In 1967 she came to London with her husband and three children.
Related FAQs
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When And Where Was Lily Ebert Born?
Lily Ebert came from Bonyhád, a small town in Hungary. Reportedly born 29 December 19230, she turned 98 years old in 1991. Her great-grandson wrote on her birthday, “Today my incredible great grandma Lily Ebert, a Holocaust survivor, turns 98!! “I never expected to survive Auschwitz. Now, at 98, I celebrate surrounded by my family – the Nazis did not win!”. To the thousands of people who sent birthday cards & messages to Lily, THANK YOU”.
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Is Lily Ebert On Instagram?
Lily is not on Instagram but she appears on her great-grandson’s IG (@dovforman).
