Yahoo Finance 98-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Is Keeping Her Promise to Tell Her Story — and She's Doing It on TikTok
Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock Lily Ebert
After surviving the Holocaust as a young girl, Lily Ebert promised herself that she would spend the rest of her life telling her story. These days, she's finding her audience on TikTok.
Ebert, who was 20 years old when she and her family arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp, decided to begin making videos to share on the platform during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, according to CBS News.
Dov Forman, her 18-year-old great-grandson who helps run the account, told the outlet, "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?' "
In one of their first videos, Ebert stressed the importance of being able to share her own experience.
"I want to tell you about my story, because in a few years time I won't be able to. It will became a history," she said.
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Today, Ebert has grown a massive following on TikTok, where she has over 1.6M users learning about her stories of Auschwitz and survival.
"I was in Auschwitz for four months. Four months in a death camp. People would say, 'Four months is not so long.' But I will tell you something…even four months was too long," she said in one video, adding in another, "In Auschwitz you were not afraid of death, you were afraid to live."
In response to a question about what everyday life was like there, she simply replied, "the answer is it was not life."
Ebert has also opened up about her liberation experience on Jan. 27, 1945.
When asked about the first thing she did afterwards, she said, "I lay down on the floor and fell asleep."
"I am sure a few people went to eat something because we were very hungry, but I was so tired because we could not sleep [in the camp], so I went straight to sleep," she shared in a video.
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Through the platform, Ebert was even able to reunite with the family of an American soldier who helped liberate her — and gave her a bank note with a message written on it that helped keep her going.
"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," her great-grandson told CBS News.
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For Ebert, the opportunity to reach an entirely new audience on TikTok has been a blessing.
"It is a miracle that I am here. 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," she told CBS News.
