Lily Ebert, who has died aged 100, was one of the last survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. She dedicated the final decades of her life to bearing witness to the experience of Holocaust victims.
She survived transportation to the camp where her mother, Nina, a younger sister Berta and brother Bela did not. They were singled out by the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, the notorious “angel of death”, on the arrival of the train bringing them from Hungary.
Gesturing to the left with his stick, Mengele consigned half the family to the gas chambers, and Lily and her two sisters, René and Piri, to the right, to be put to work. Seeing smoke rising later from the crematorium chimney and thinking it was a factory, Lily was told by another inmate: “They are burning your families there. Your parents, your sisters, your brothers. They’re burning them.”
Her experience led decades later to talks to schools and colleges, to conferences, interviews and to collaborating with government ministries. When she was 96, she published a bestselling memoir, co-written with her great-grandson Dov Forman, called Lily’s Promise: How I survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live. With Dov, again, she created a TikTok account, which gained 2 million followers.
She was born Livia Engelman, the eldest of six children of Ahron, a textile shop owner, and Nina (nee Bresnitz), in Bonyhád in south-western Hungary, a town divided between its German, Orthodox and Jewish inhabitants, with the latter making up 14% of the population.
Her father died when she was 18, and two years later, in March 1944, when German troops invaded the country, she and the rest of the family were rounded up with the town’s Jews. Within weeks they were all loaded on to cattle trucks for the five-day rail journey to Auschwitz, “locked in with corpses, a few more each day”, she recalled.
Her brother Imre had carved out a hollow in the heel of their mother’s shoe and hidden in it the family jewellery, including a tiny pendant of a golden angel that Lily had been given when she was five. In the late stages of the journey she and her mother swapped shoes. The hidden jewellery was missed by the Nazis and Lily retained the pendant. It was, she said, “the only gold to enter and leave Auschwitz with its original owner”.
The three sisters worked as seamstresses at the camp, during which time Lily nearly died of scarlet fever, before being moved four months later to another camp, Altenburg, part of Buchenwald, near Weimar. There they worked in a munitions factory, Lily managing to pass defective bullets with usable ones in her job as a supervisor. When her mother’s shoes disintegrated she hid the pendant in a piece of bread, which she kept under her armpit. For the rest of her life she always carried a morsel of bread as a reminder of her wartime deprivation.
In April 1945 the women at the factory were forced to march from the camp without food, water, sleep or shoes, with those who lagged behind summarily shot. On the third day the guards disappeared as American tanks approached. By then, Ebert said, they were “unrecognisable as human beings, emaciated creatures, filthy, hollow-eyed, half-crazed with relief and disbelief”. They were originally moved back to Buchenwald – staying in the guard quarters this time – and then to Switzerland for rehabilitation.
The sisters emigrated to Israel in June 1946, living first at a kibbutz and then near Tel Aviv. In 1948 Lily married a Hungarian businessman, Shmuel Ebert, and the couple had three children, Esti, Bilha and Roni.
After the Hungarian uprising in 1956 the family was reunited with Imre, who had also survived the Holocaust only to be trapped after the Communist takeover. In 1967 Lily and Shmuel moved to Golders Green, north London; he died in 1984.
Lily did not speak of her experiences until the 1990s, after joining a survivors’ support group. In 1992 she first addressed a Holocaust education conference and later helped found a survivors’ centre in Golders Green. The book, written with the then 16-year-old Dov, followed in 2021. “I realised that I wanted to record what had happened to me in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I wanted my children to know eventually and their children and their children’s children.”
She was awarded a British Empire Medal, was made a Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit in Hungary, and an MBE last year.
Her portrait and those of six other survivors are in the Royal Collection. When she met the then Prince Charles at the exhibition opening at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, in 2022, she told him: “Meeting you, it is for everyone who lost their lives.” He replied: “But it is a greater privilege for me.”
After her death, the King – who is patron of the Holocaust Memorial Trust – said of Lily: “I am so proud that she found a home in Britain where she continued to tell the world of the atrocities she had witnessed, as a reminder for our generation – and for future generations – of the depths of depravity to which humankind can fall, when reason, compassion and truth are abandoned.”
She returned to visit the camp with Esti in 1988 and again with three grandchildren in 1996. She wrote: “The satisfaction of walking freely into Auschwitz and walking freely out again, through those gates of hell, made me stronger.
“When I was brought to Auschwitz in 1944 they told me there was no way out, only through the chimney. ‘This was not your plan,’ I kept thinking. ‘Look at me: I am back. You wanted to kill me and yet I am here again. You murderers aren’t here any more, but I am … I have kept the promise I made myself in the camp. I have told the world what happened.’”
She is survived by Piri, two of her three children, 10 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild.
• Lily Ebert, Holocaust survivor, writer and educator, born 29 December 1923; died 9 October 2024
