Lily Ebert spent Yom Kippur 1944 in Auschwitz and made herself a promise.
“If I ever came out of that place, I was determined to do something that would change everything,” she writes in her newly published autobiography. “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.”
Nearly eight decades on, few could dispute that 97-year-old Ebert has fulfilled that promise — many times over.
She has done so not just by telling her remarkable story in “Lily’s Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live,” but also through years of Holocaust education work. Thanks to her great-grandson, Dov Forman, that work has gained a huge new social media audience during the pandemic. The pair have 1.4 million TikTok followers, and their social media output has an average of about 1 million views a day.
“You can see I am not a youngster anymore. I learn from young people and I am so happy,” Ebert told The Times of Israel during an interview together with 17-year-old Forman. “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.”
Despite her impish good humor and self-evident joy at the close bond she has formed with her great-grandson through their work together, Ebert talks about her family’s tragic story with painful honesty and openness.
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