Holocaust survivor and educator Lily Ebert has passed away at the age of 100, having lived a life dedicated to sharing her story, spreading hope and light, and ensuring Jews never suffer the same atrocities that she did.
When Ebert spent Yom Kippur of 1944 in the desolation of an Auschwitz-Birkenau barrack, she made a powerful promise to herself, one which she would go on to fulfill time and again in the decades to come.
“If I ever came out of that place, I was determined to do something that would change everything,” she wrote in her 2021 bestselling memoir Lily’s Promise. “I promised myself I would tell the world what had happened. Not just to me, but to all the people who could not tell their stories.”
Ebert, who was awarded an MBE by King Charles in 2023 for her contributions to Holocaust education, has made good on her promise.
In her later years, Ebert devoted herself wholly to the cause of Holocaust education, giving countless talks in schools and interviews to international media outlets, and recording her story in detail for the British Library and the Imperial War Museum. She helped set up Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in the 1990s, telling the JC in 2009: “The community thinks that what we went through is our problem to deal with. But it’s not. Everyone should be involved.”
With her great-grandson Dov Forman, Ebert successfully lobbied parliament for the creation of a UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre and, in 2021, captured the hearts of an audience numbering in the millions on social media, where she shared her story with younger generations around the globe.
Lily holding Dov as a baby.
Born as the eldest of six children on December 29, 1923, in Bonyhád, Hungary, where an eighth of the residents were Jewish, Livia (Lily) Ebert (née Engelman) was, in her own words, “a born leader.”
“Right from the beginning, all my brothers and sisters looked up to me,” she wrote in her memoir. “They knew I knew best. And later, that helped us all.”
Ebert’s father was a textile merchant, selling fabrics from his own shop in the small southwestern town, and her mother came from a line of rabbis. Until her father died of pneumonia in 1942, Ebert recalled having a happy, loving childhood “where every one of us was allowed to be ourselves,” and where hours could be spent in the family’s enormous garden full of chrysanthemums, sunflowers, a walnut tree, and “every kind of fruit bush you could imagine.”
But in 1944, just two years after her father’s passing, the Nazis invaded Hungary.
“He was lucky to die when he did, “Ebert wrote. “At least he escaped all the pain that would come so soon. He would never have to know his family’s fate.”
The last photo of Piri, Berta, Imi, Lily and Renee together in 1943.
The Engelman family, along with the other Jews of Bonyhád, were forced to live in a small ghetto, where Ebert’s oldest brother Imi carved a hole in the heel of his mother’s shoe to hide her earrings, rings and a golden angel pendant. Shortly after, he was taken away by Nazi soldiers.
The family was then moved to a transit camp 30 miles away, where they stayed for three days before being packed like cattle onto a train to Auschwitz. When they reached the last leg of the dreadful five-day journey, Ebert’s mother, acting on a gut feeling, swapped shoes with her eldest daughter. That same day, she was murdered in the gas chambers along with Ebert’s younger brother Bela and younger sister Berta.
Without a moment to say goodbye, Ebert and her remaining sisters René and Piri were on their own.
They were stripped, shaved and tattooed with identification numbers. When Ebert asked another inmate about the air’s awful stench and the flames that leapt from the tall chimneys, the woman told her bluntly: “They’re burning your families there. Your parents, your sisters, your brothers. They’re burning them.”
Lily and her two sisters.
Ebert, René and Piri were selected to work as seamstresses in the camp, living perpetually in fear of execution. They survived starvation so severe they ceased having periods, and Ebert narrowly escaped death from scarlet fever. Ebert stowed her mother’s precious jewellery in her daily bread ration, which she tucked into her armpit.
Four months after their arrival, the sisters were transferred to a munitions factory in a labour camp near Leipzig. During her 12-hour shifts, Ebert’s small act of resistance was mixing the faulty bullets with the usable ones.
In early 1945, the sounds of Allied bombs had moved closer and closer, eventually falling on Leipzig and Dresden. One day in April, the 2,000 inmates at the factory were ordered to leave the camp and instructed to march without food, water or adequate shoes for three days, until the rumble of American tanks was suddenly upon them, and they were rescued.
Though Ebert and the others were emaciated beyond recognition, she had managed to keep hold of her mother’s gold angel pendant, a symbol of everything she’d lost.
From there, the sisters were sent to Switzerland where they were supported by a Jewish organisation throughout their recovery. Other than their brother Imi, who they learned had survived the war but was stuck in Hungary, they had no remaining family living.
King Charles speaks with with Lily Ebert at an exhibition of Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust, which were commissioned to pay tribute to Holocaust survivors, at The Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace in 2022. (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
In 1946 they were among a number of Holocaust survivors emigrating to Israel, where Ebert soon discovered that “very few people our age had living parents.”
Two years later, Ebert married fellow Hungarian Shmuel Ebert and the couple had three children: Esti, Bilha and Roni. In 1956, following the Hungarian Revolution, Ebert’s brother Imi was able to escape and join his sisters in Israel, bringing with him the Shabbat candlesticks he had recovered from their parents’ home.
Ebert and her family moved to London in 1967 after her husband’s health began to deteriorate. Following Shmuel’s death in 1984, Ebert began to look back at her own life and the terrors she had experienced, realising, like so many Holocaust survivors at the time, that it might benefit others to tell her story.
“I realised that I wanted to record what had happened to me in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” she wrote. “I wanted my children to know eventually, and their children, and their children’s children.”
Ebert returned to the gates of Auschwitz with her daughter Esti in 1988 and again with her grandchildren in 1996. The experience of walking freely in and out was emboldening, and, as she wrote, “made me stronger.”
Lily and Dov.
From that point on, Ebert never faltered on the promise she made in 1944, and spent the remainder of her life as “a beacon of resilience, courage, and unwavering faith in difficult times,” as the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis said in his tribute to her.
"She emerged from the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz, not with bitterness or cynicism, but with a promise: to bear witness, to educate, and to inspire. Her undeniable fulfillment of that promise stands as Lily’s legacy and our thoughts are with her dear family,” the Chief Rabbi said.
King Charles himself also paid tribute to Ebert, whom he met personally at the unveiling of portraits of her and six other survivors that he had commissioned as part of a memorial to the Holocaust victims.
"As a survivor of the unmentionable horrors of the Holocaust, I am so proud that she later found a home in Britain where she continued to tell the world of the horrendous atrocities she had witnessed, as a permanent reminder for our generation – and, indeed, for future generations – of the depths of depravity and evil to which humankind can fall, when reason, compassion and truth are abandoned,” King Charles said.
Ebert is survived by a son and daughter,10 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren, and one great-great grandchild, in each of whom her legacy lives on.
As she wrote in Lily’s Promise: “It’s so important to tell the world what can happen when we are not tolerant of each other. That is the main thing to understand. When somebody is different from you, it doesn’t mean they are worse or better. They are only different. If we can understand that, we can live in peace with one another.”
