A 97-year-old woman who survived the Auschwitz death camp and the subsequent death marches, and now uses her TikTok account to educate people about the Holocaust, was viciously attacked online after simply wishing her followers a restful Sabbath.
Lily Ebert stated in the TikTok video, “Wishing you a lovely, peaceful weekend. … Shabbat Shalom.”
She received responses including, “Happy Holocaust,” “Peace be upon Hitler,” and “You still alive?”
Ebert’s great-grandson Dov Forman tweeted, “Over the past few days my great Grandmother and I have continued to receive messages of hate on Tiktok and Twitter. We will not allow this to stop us from educating about the horrors of the past, and what hatred can lead to. Hate only breeds hate.”
At 97, Lily Ebert (https://t.co/3lEsxkSYsH) is one of the oldest Jewish creators on TikTok. She is also a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp.
Neither was enough to restrain the online mob looking for Jews to abuse since Israel's bombings of Gaza.
https://t.co/vERbkF4DZ0— Insider (@thisisinsider) May 23, 2021
Over the past few days my great Grandmother (Auschwitz survivor) and I have continued to receive messages of hate on Tiktok and Twitter.
We will not allow this to stop us from educating about the horrors of the past, and what hatred can lead to.
Hate only breeds hate. https://t.co/BYuka397KR pic.twitter.com/b0Lx0f8gLI
— Dov Forman (@DovForman) May 16, 2021
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust wrote about Lily’s experiences under Hitler’s Nazi regime:
In July 1944, when Lily was 14, the Nazis deported her from her town of Bonyhad with her mother, brother and three sisters. They were taken by train, crammed into dark and almost airless cattle trucks, to Auschwitz. … They were ordered to climb out of the train and stand together five in a row. There was a man with a stick in his hand. It was Dr. Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who became known as the Angel of Death for his brutal experiments on inmates, though at the time Lily didn’t know who he was. With one movement of his hand Dr. Mengele sealed the fate of the people before him. He sent people right or left — to life or to death. The people who were sent to the left were taken immediately to the gas chambers and crematorium. Lily and her two sisters Renee and Piri went right. Her mother Nina, brother Bela and sister Berta went left. She never saw them again. …
Lily and her sisters saw a fire in the chimneys, and smelt a terrible smell. They thought it was a factory and asked people about it. They were told it was not a factory and that it was Lily’s family who were being burned there with all the others who had been sent down the path to the left.
Liberated from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp by U.S. soldiers from the 6th Armored Division in April 1945, Ebert received a banknote from an American soldier on which he had wished her, “The start to a new life. Good luck and happiness.” Ebert told BBC’s Today program, “’I even didn’t know what I have with this note, how interesting it is and how interesting it will be for the whole world. I got something from a soldier who did not have a piece of paper to write on … so instead he took out this banknote and he wrote good luck for future life.”
Last July, Ebert made contact with the family of the soldier, Private Hayman Shulman, who died seven years ago. “This soldier was the first human being who was kind to us. It was the first time after this terrible life that somebody was kind and I knew that somebody wants to help,” Ebert recalled.
Ebert has stated, “I promised myself that if I survived by some miracle, I would tell the world what happened there. The next generation and next generations should know the story so that something like that should not be repeated to any human being ever.”
Yesterday my great Grandma (Lily Ebert – an Auschwitz survivor) showed me this bank note- given to her as a gift by a soldier who liberated her. Inscribed, it says “a start to a new life. Good luck and happiness”. Later on, she met up with those who freed her (third photo). pic.twitter.com/LAx2ZGFCnH
— Dov Forman (@DovForman) July 5, 2020