When Gidon Lev is out and about in Israel, he is sometimes stopped by people who recognise him from social media. But he’s no glossy influencer; he’s an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, prominent thanks to his TikTok videos, in which he talks about his experiences and optimistic life philosophy. His biggest fanbase (he has almost 500,000 followers) is in America, and he even has celebrity fans; after using a Kinks song to soundtrack a video, the band’s singer, Ray Davies, got in touch.
“Young kids playing volleyball will say, look, it’s him,” explains Julie Gray, Lev’s partner and co-writer of the book Let’s Make Things Better, about Lev. “It’s because Gidon is cool. He dances, he has bright blue eyes. He’s cheerful. He’s this ideal of what you’d want to be when you’re older.”
Make Things Better by Gidon Lev and Julie Gray is published by Macmillan this week.
Certainly, Lev sparkles, on and off the page, and comes across younger than his years. Perhaps he is making up for a lost childhood; born in Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia, his family fled to Prague before being sent to Theresienstadt when Lev was six.
When the camp was liberated, Lev had been imprisoned for four years and lost his father, grandfather and more than 20 other relatives. He remembers that time as one of everything happening “at such tremendous pace”, from going to school for the first time, to playing football or more basic things like having sufficient food or walking freely. Things most children take for granted but had been deprived from him by the Nazis.
Even then, he knew how he responded to his experiences would shape his future. Whereas his mother never really moved past her grief (although she did remarry a man from their home town), he says he “chose life and I’m so happy I did”.
Gidon Lev and Julie Gray. (Photo: Rebecca Nathan Kowalsky)
“Right after the war when we came back to Prague, my mother and I and were waiting to hear who from my family had survived and would be coming back. People were talking about revenge and there were people who committed themselves to hunting down Nazis that weren’t caught by the Russians or the British or the Americans,” he says. “I thought, do I want to commit myself to that? Would I have a life of my own? Would I have a family? And I decided against it. I was what, ten, 11, 12 years old – these were my thoughts.”
He and his mother eventually moved to New York, then Toronto, before he emigrated alone to Israel in 1959. His life since has been colourful to say the least. Initially a kibbutznik, he had two children from a short-lived first marriage before a second that produced four more.
He and his late wife Susan lived an itinerant life, with Lev taking many jobs, including as a florist delivery driver, a milk tester and dance teacher. They moved frequently, including, for a short while, to Wales. For all his early tragedy, it was a life filled with joy; he recounts a cross-American road trip with five kids, and he tells me about madcap hikes in northern Israel with children who could barely walk.
For years, he kept largely silent about his story, until the late 1980s when he found himself speaking to some German students. Once he started talking, he couldn’t stop and now, with Gray’s help, he is focused on sharing his experiences.
For Gray, an American, reaching the younger generation is critical. “In our experience on social media, we really noticed that with young people, particularly those in wealthy nations who live rather comfortable lives, there seems to be a big distance between themselves and their knowledge of who has gone before them,” she says. “I wanted to speak to younger people for whom a lot of this history is totally foreign. That’s basically the reason we joined TikTok.”
Lev says the book is aimed at “everybody who cares about humanity and making a world a better place for all of us”. He hopes readers will come away “less disillusioned with the state of things”.
As someone so positive about the power of people to change the world, has he found it tough to retain this philosophy post October 7? We are speaking after news emerges of the murder of six hostages. “Yes, absolutely,” he sighs. “We feel it every day, every day something happens that is very difficult and sad and sometimes horrific. Keeping a positive attitude and a desire to not give up, not to give in, is challenging.”
He never imagined he would see such brutality again. “No, not the viciousness and barbarity of it, I didn’t think that could happen again,” he says. “Having seen such horrific scenes of inhumanity. I didn’t think this can repeat.”
When news of the atrocities emerged, he said to himself: “This is like what they did in the Holocaust. Except the Germans did it more systematically. These people must have had Nazi instructors. Because otherwise, how would they know to behave in such a way?”
Lev is also living proof of humans’ ability to rebuild, and he hopes he can instill in survivors a confidence that they will eventually come out the other side. He is in touch with one teenager whose mother shielded his body for hours and was herself shot and killed on October 7.
“We can sometimes survive situations that are almost or totally unbelievable,” he says. “I cannot imagine being protected by my mother lying on top of me for hours. What went through that child’s mind, how strong and determined he must have been to survive. It is really unbelievable.”
Gidon Lev. (Photo: Rebecca Nathan Kowalsky)
His book also demonstrates how victims of atrocities don’t have to be defined by tragedy. “People say, look, it’s a Holocaust survivor,” says Gray. “That’s his title. And yes, that’s a fact. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Who is Gidon? He’s a farmer. He’s a father, he’s a grandfather. He’s a person who fixes stuff. He contains multitudes. That is an experience he had, which was formative. It was devastating. But the minute Gidon was liberated, he carried on with this passion for what’s next. He’s a Holocaust survivor, but he’s so much more. Nobody should be reduced to their greatest trauma.”
In fact, for years Lev didn’t focus on his early life, even privately. “It was not something I lived in day by day. I was so concentrated on making a living, raising my kids, doing things with them. The Holocaust was there and it affected probably many things I did or didn’t do, but it was not a daily presence,” he says. “When you have so many kids, you’re pretty busy. Even if your wife is fantastic and does a thousand things, you’re the other person if there’s no milk in the fridge.”
Writing the book has brought back long dormant memories. “We go through life and do things, but we don’t really think about them too much. When you write things down, things come back that you haven’t remembered in years.”
Meanwhile, he’s showing no signs of slowing down. There’s a European book tour in November, with fans to meet in real life, while a documentary on his life story is being made by Yaniv Rokah, whose previous credits include the award-winning Queen Mimi. Could that ten-year-old, tasting freedom for the first time, have conceived of the life he would go on to lead? “No, no, no, I could not,” he says. “It would be impossible.”
Let’s Make Things Better by Gidon Lev and Julie Gray is published by Macmillan this week
