Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live

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It's hard to stomach those rude remarks, but you won't ask questions like that while reading this book.

Her great grandson Dov has helped by publicising her experiences on social media and using Twitter, for example, to identify a particular US soldier who wrote her a message of hope for the future in 1945.We owe it to every Holocaust victim, and survivor like Lily, to educate new generations about the horrors of that atrocity so it can never be allowed to happen again. Biography: Lily Ebert lives in London near her large and loving family, which includes thirty-four great-grandchildren.

I had a Jewish friend tell me that she has a hard time talking about the Holocaust with her children. But, none of the books of this genre that I have read over the past 10 years have moved me, nor have really shown me and led me to feel, what true hell their experiences were. Finally, one specific point Lily makes that is shockingly true, is that she thought the Holocaust was the end of genocides, and yet today and recent history (Cambodia, Rwanda, etc) genocides still occur.I’ve always been interested in the Holocaust, I’ve always watched movies, documentaries, and read whatever I could find online about it. She is a founder member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education.

So I did not start reading this book without prior knowledge -to some degree - of survivors’ experiences. Lily’s story is more than what happened to her and her family in the concentration camps — yes, she was in more than one. Apparently during the pandemic, a 96 year old Auschwitz surviver was tearing up TikTok with her great-great-grandson talking about her survival. I assured her that the messages won't be lost because non Jewish people share it with their children. Later on Shmuel suffered poor health and needed a cooler climate so the family moved to Britain and settled in north London, leaving Rene and Piri back in Israel.

It's a well rounded story, telling of the difficulties after the war, where they went and what they did to move on in life. Lily was born in Hungary where she lived in the small town of Bonyhád with her three sisters and two brothers and their parents. Your Grandson is a wonderful person who deserves the highest praise for encouraging and supporting you to tell your story and then find so many answers for you. Utterly compelling, heartbreaking, truthful and yet redemptive, a memoir of the Holocaust, a testimony of irrepressible spirit and an unforgettable family chronicle, written in lucid prose by a truly remarkable woman about her life from Hungary to Auschwitz, Israel to London.

She shares details that are so intimate, personal: the moment her mother removes her shoes and passes them over to Lily.

And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world.