98-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Lily Ebert Shares Her Story Through TikTok
By Kristin Myers on May 15, 2022 at 8:00 AM EDT
Her TikTok account has more than 1.6 million followers. Her videos have gained over 23 million likes for her posts, which feature stories about the horrors she faced while surviving the Holocaust.
CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D'Agata met Ebert just ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which recognizes when the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, was liberated almost 77 years ago.
Lily Ebert Admits ‘I Was Not Really Sure That I Would Stay Alive’
“I was really not sure that I would stay alive. It is a miracle that I am here,” Lily said. “But I promised myself, however long I will be alive, and whatever I will do in life, one thing is sure, I will tell my story.”
At age 20, Lily arrived in Auschwitz with her mother, her brother, and one of her sisters. However, the guards took her family away from her, leading them off to the gas chambers to be executed the afternoon that they arrived.
“What really happened in our darkest moment, we wouldn't think of that,” Lily continued. “It was not in our mind that something like that can happen.”
Lily has been sharing her story with her 18-year-old great-grandson, Dov Forman, who started the videos during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
Dov recalled “I said to my great-grandmother, 'If they can go viral for dancing, why can't we go viral for sharing these really important messages?'”
Holocaust Story Goes Viral As 98-Year-Old Survivor Shares Her Story
A video of Lily showing her identification number tattoo got more than 20 million views as she quickly became a viral sensation and a symbol of an atrocity that happened long before most viewers were born.
One particular video that followers adored was a story where Lily explained that she started talking to an American GI who wrote her a message on a German banknote after Auschwitz was liberated. “He wrote me, 'Good life, good luck for your future,'” Lily recalled.
The viral video put Dov on a mission to try to find that soldier. “I remember joking with my great-grandmother that I would be able to find the soldier in 24 hours,” he recalled.
Fortunately, it took only a fraction of the time.
Dov said, “I posted it, and within eight hours I had, I think, 8,000 notifications and the tweets had 2 million views. And an hour later we had managed to find the soldier.”
Unfortunately, Private Hyman Shulman, from Brooklyn, passed away in 2013. However, they were able to set up a Zoom call with his son, Jason.
“Quite honestly, that I thought at first that this was a scam of some sort, and yet when I looked at the banknote there, it said something like 'good luck and happiness' and there in Hebrew lettering was my father's Hebrew name, first and middle name,” Jason Shulman told the outlet. “After I got over my distrust and realized something real was going on, it really did give me the chills.”
Lily and Dov currently live in London. Lily has authored a book called “Lily’s Promise” which includes a foreword by Prince Charles. The two have even met U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Downing Street.
Through one TikTok video at a time, Lily said, “I thought single-handedly, I will tell my story and I will change the world.”
