Lily Ebert, Holocaust Survivor Who Found Fame on TikTok, Dies at 100

Hungarian-born Jewish woman hesitated to tell her story. Then a great-grandson introduced her to social media.

By James R. Hagerty
https://twitter.com/jamesrhagerty
jamesrhagerty888@gmail.com
Nov. 1, 2024 10:00 am ET

As a prisoner in Nazi prison camps during World War II, Lily Engelman vowed that—if she survived—she would one day bear witness to the systematic slaughter of Jewish people. ... After the war, she emigrated from Hungary to Israel, where she found sewing work in a mattress factory. She married another Hungarian-speaking Jew, Shmuel Ebert, who had fled Europe before the war.

Despite her vow, however, she found herself rarely even mentioning the Holocaust after the war. People noticed the number tattooed on her left forearm but didn’t ask questions. ... They could never fathom the horrors she had endured, she thought. As for her own children, she preferred not to terrify them. ... Only in the late 1980s, spurred partly by questions from one of her daughters, did she begin to open up. Resettled in London, she told her story in schools, in gatherings of other survivors and even in the British Parliament. Once she sat on a sofa in a London train station and talked about the Holocaust with anyone who stopped to listen.

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In April 1945, as the Nazi regime collapsed and bombs pelted Germany, the three sisters were ordered onto a helter-skelter march to an unknown destination. “If somebody sat down for a second, they were executed on the spot,” she wrote. Finally, under intensifying bombardment, the guards vanished, and the prisoners were free. American soldiers gaped at their “hands like claws” and the “skin stretched over the bones of our faces,” then offered the stunned survivors chocolate and corned beef. ... “Our stomachs had forgotten what to do with food,” Lily Ebert wrote. For the rest of her life, she kept the habit of carrying a bit of bread everywhere she went, just in case. She also wore the gold pendant once hidden in her mother’s shoe. Nobody else, she figured, had managed to bring gold into Auschwitz and bring it out.

She is survived by her sister Piri Engelman, two of her three children, 10 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson. ... “It’s very important that the world should know what happened,” she said in an interview late in her life. “We are only a few of us…. Most of us are not here any longer. What will happen in a few years’ time?”

Write to James R. Hagerty at reports@wsj.com