98-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Lily Ebert Shares Her Reason For Keeping Her Auschwitz Tattoo

Having lost more than 100 relatives during the Holocaust, Lily Ebert, who survived that dark period, has made it her life mission to constantly share her experience about the antisemitic horrors she witnessed and endured.

Like other Holocaust survivors, the nonagenarian remained reticent about her traumatic experiences for decades. However, due to recent Holocaust insensitive jokes and denials, Ebert is striving to tell the story with the aspiration of preventing any future recurrence of such horrors. Her 18-year-old great-grandson, Dov Forman, has supported the mission and helped her set up a TikTok account so she can reach a wider audience.

Lily Ebert’s TikTok success shot her into the spotlight

Remarkably, Ebert’s story resonated with many people as she swiftly garnered a substantial following of about 1.7 million followers within just one year of posting her first video. In these videos, she recounted the harrowing experiences within the Jewish ghettos and her four-month imprisonment in Auschwitz.

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Her success on TikTok brought significant attention to her cause, resulting in her co-authoring a book titled Lily’s Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live with Forman.

Lily Ebert speaks about the reason why she will never remove her Auschwitz tattoo

During an appearance on Good Morning Britain along with her great-grandson, Ebert stated that her commitment to relaying the tales of the Holocaust is because she considers herself the mouthpiece for the numerous victims. “My story today is never my story; it is the story really for the thousands, millions, who cannot talk. I am here to talk; I can do it because they are not here anymore,” she admitted. “I have to do it, to talk about the millions who cannot talk anymore. They killed my mother, brother and sister, and other millions of other innocent people.”

While answering a question during the interview, Ebert revealed that she kept her Auschwitz tattoo to use as a symbol of the inhumanity suffered by the victims of the Holocaust. “No, I have never thought about having it removed. I want to show the world. Seeing something or to hear about it, it makes a big difference. The world should know how deep they cut, how deep humans can go. The fellow humans give a tattoo. You are not a human, you were not Lily Ebert anymore, you were a number. You wear a tattoo, you wear a number. Not more, not less,” Ebert confessed. “Another human can take away my humanity. They are not humans, not me.”