Lily Ebert, Holocaust Survivor, Author and TikTok Star, Dies at 100

She survived Auschwitz, wrote a best-selling memoir, “Lily’s Promise,” and spoke to a following of 2 million fans on TikTok.

In July 1944, when Lily Ebert was 20 years old, she and most of her family were packed onto a train and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where on arrival she watched as her mother and two of her siblings were led to a gas chamber. She would never see them again.

That Yom Kippur, as she, her two sisters and others were squeezed together, praying in the barracks, Ms. Ebert promised herself that her mother and younger siblings would not have died for nothing. If she survived, she would tell the world what had happened to them, and to those who had no one to tell their stories.

Ms. Ebert did survive, and she spent the rest of her life fulfilling that vow. She spoke publicly about her experiences, wrote a memoir, “Lily’s Promise,” which became a New York Times best seller, and educated millions of young followers about the horrors of the Holocaust on TikTok, through an account she shared with her great-grandson Dov Forman.

Mr. Forman confirmed that she died at her home in London on Oct 9. She was 100.

Lívia Engelman was born on Dec. 29, 1923, in Bonyhád, Hungary, to Ahron, who sold textiles, and Nina (Bresnitz) Engelman. In her memoir, Ms. Ebert described a fairly idyllic childhood, with tender parents and a town that was a “friendly, bustling kind of place.” One of six siblings, she grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family that considered itself proudly Hungarian. Her father died when she was 18.

In 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and occupied towns throughout the country, including Bonyhád. Soldiers imposed a curfew on residents and confiscated anything of value. Then on May 15, with only an hour’s notice, Hungarian police officers, guns drawn, forced the town’s Jewish residents into a ghetto.

“We thought we were going for a few days, a few weeks at most,” Ms. Ebert wrote in her memoir. “We had no idea we’d never come back.”

Weeks passed as Ms. Ebert and her family lived in cramped quarters and worked weeding fields. Then, in July 1944, the officers forced all of the Jews in the ghetto onto cattle cars, squeezed together in fetid air, with two buckets in each car — one for water, and one to use as a toilet.

They were among the roughly 440,000 Jews deported from Hungary between May 15 and July 9 that year, with the majority sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After the train carrying Ms. Ebert’s family arrived at Auschwitz, soldiers dragged away those who were too weak to move. The rest lined up, and two of Ms. Ebert’s younger siblings and their mother were sent to the left. Ms. Ebert and two of her other sisters were sent right.

Smoke rose from a large chimney in the distance, and Ms. Ebert was told that her family had been killed in the gas chambers and burned in a crematory. The reality seemed impossible to comprehend.

“Auschwitz was really a killing factory — we were the fuel,” Ms. Ebert said in a 2014 interview with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

In October 1944, Ms. Ebert and her sisters were sent to Altenburg, in Germany, a sub-camp of Buchenwald that operated as a munitions factory.

With Germany on the brink of surrender in April 1945, the Nazis sent Ms. Ebert, her two sisters and more than 2,000 others at the camp on a death march, but American soldiers began bombing the area, and the Nazis fled, enabling the Allied forces to rescue them. Much later, in 1956, Ms. Ebert was reunited with her brother, Imi, who had been sent from the ghetto to a labor camp.

What followed was a circuitous journey through Germany, Switzerland and Israel, where Ms. Ebert met her husband, Shmuel Ebert, who was also Hungarian and worked in imports and exports.

After Ms. Ebert worked in a mattress factory in Tel Aviv, she and Mr. Ebert married in 1948 and had three children: Esther, who died from cancer in 2012, and Bilha Weider and Ahron who survive her. Ms. Ebert is also survived by her sister, Piri Engelman, 10 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson.

In the mid-1960s, the family moved to London. There, Ms. Ebert joined a support group for survivors, and began to write down her memories.

In 1992, she was asked by a trauma expert to speak at a Holocaust education conference, where Ms. Ebert told the crowd about her experiences in the camp. Afterward, she felt an urgency to share her story further.

She helped to found the Holocaust Survivors’ Center as well as a sister organization that provided therapy for survivors in need. She spoke at schools and at the Houses of Parliament, and in 2015 Ms. Ebert was awarded the British Empire Medal for her efforts in Holocaust education and awareness. In 2023, Ms. Ebert was made a Member of the British Order by King Charles for services to Holocaust education.

On July 5, 2020, her great-grandson Mr. Forman posted a short tweet with a picture of a note that a soldier had written Ms. Ebert during her liberation. The Auschwitz Memorial Museum retweeted the post, which went on to receive more than one million views. The post also caught the attention of someone who had known the soldier, and though he had died, his children arranged a Zoom call to meet Ms. Ebert.

It was then that Ms. Ebert and her great-grandson began to think about using social media to further spread her story.

In February 2021, Mr. Forman created a TikTok account under their names to post videos of her Holocaust reflections and her achievements, such as the time in 2022, when King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, unveiled a portrait of her at Buckingham Palace. The account also featured educators discussing antisemitism, and celebrated Jewish daily life.

The goal of the TikTok account, Mr. Forman said in an interview, was not only to share Ms. Ebert’s past and keep her stories about the Holocaust alive, but to also show that she went on to build a family and live a normal life.

“She realized people will be learning from her, and people will become her witness,” Mr. Forman said.

The more Ms. Ebert publicly unearthed the atrocities she had witnessed, the more she understood the value of sharing her story.

“I would talk for my own sake, and I would also speak for those I loved who hadn’t survived,” Ms. Ebert wrote in her memoir. “And for all the millions of people I never knew who died with them, all over Europe. I want the world to never forget this terrible crime against humanity.”

As Ms. Ebert’s world became unrecognizable in the camp, there was one token of life before the war that she and her sisters could hold onto: a tiny pendant of an angel that her mother had given her as a child.

While in the ghetto, her brother Imi had hidden the item and their mother’s earrings and rings in a shoe heel that Ms. Ebert then wore in the camp. When it degraded, she hid the jewelry in her daily bread ration, risking death if she was caught. She wore the pendant for the rest of her life.

“Not only I survived,” she told The Times in 2018, “but my jewelry that you didn’t want me to keep, survived with me.”