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

This is an intensely moving and inspirational memoir by a Holocaust survivor, the now 98 year old Lily Ebert (nee Engelmann), survivor of Auschwitz, of one of the Buchenwald satellite camps and of a forced death march across Germany before being rescued by US soldiers in April 1945. The work was written in cooperation with her great grandson Dov Forman, who helped to her her story out there on social media and help with gaps in her memories.Lily was born in Hungary where she lived in the small town of Bonyhád with her three sisters and two brothers and their parents. They were a very close knit, but liberal and tolerant family, and their upbringing was idyllic, despite the occasional spectre of long term historical anti-semitism in Hungary. Life continued largely as normal for the family, until the death of the father from natural causes in 1942. The Holocaust in force came late to Hungary, after the Germans overran the country in March 1944. The elder son was conscripted into a labour service, while Lily, her three sisters and younger brother, and their mother were sent to a ghetto and, along with the rest of the Jewish population of their town, kept in increasingly stringent conditions until they were deported to Auschwitz in early July. On arrival, Lily's mother and her youngest sister and younger brother were immediately sent to the gas chamber, while Lily and her other two sisters Rene and Piri survived to go through months of work, exhaustion and starvation. Lily and her sisters and some others whom they befriended essentially survived by having a mutual support network and being determined to stay together to maintain a small oasis of sanity amid the madness and horror. Lily kept her mother's jewels hidden in her shoe and, later, in successive pieces of daily bread throughout her experiences.After some four months in Auschwitz, the group were moved to a munitions factory attached to Buchenwald where the treatment was a little better as the Holocaust had destroyed so many lives of slave workers that even the Nazis realised they had to keep their workers alive to keep their flagging war machine going. As the allies advanced into German territory in early 1945, Lily and her group were sent on one of the notorious death marches across the territory ahead of the advancing liberators, before they were eventually saved by stumbling across some American soldiers. Meanwhile at Yom Kippur 1944, Lily had promised that, if she survived, she would never let the world forget what she and her fellows suffered.After liberation, Lily and her inseparable sisters moved to Switzerland - a country for which she nevertheless felt some resentment, as they has closed their borders to Jewish refugees in 1942, and to where children over the age of 16 were even now prevented from emigrating, thus driving 21 year old Lily to take six years off her age. Later she moved to the new state of Israel where, after briefly and unsuccessfully trying life on a kibbutz, she settled in Tel Aviv and married a confident young man Shmuel who had lived in Israel since before the war, with whom she had three 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.For decades Lily could not talk about her experiences in the Holocaust, her fellow citizens in Israel being divided essentially into two categories, fellow survivors with whom it was felt there was no need to talk about it, and those, like Shmuel, who had not been through those experiences and who could never understood what the survivors had been through. She found it easier to talk when she had grandchildren; and in addition society became more interested in hearing from Holocaust survivors in the years after the Eichmann trial in 1961 had allowed survivors for the first time to recount their experiences to a public willing more now to listen than they had been in the immediate post-war years. Thus Lily could at last carry out her Yom Kippur 1944 promise that the would let the world know what happened and she now continues to do so, working with schoolchildren through the Holocaust Educational Trust and other organisations. 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. A remarkable and inspiring story.

Touching story of a survivor, written very well.

Absolutely brilliant book of an inspirational woman who never gave up. Her story should be ready by everyone to keep her history live and never forgotten

A book that has been well written and give us a complete insight to the atrocities of Auschwitz. Lily is one very brave lady a book I would highly recommend for everybody to read.

Truly inspiring and thought provoking.What makes it so interesting is that it is the memories and recollections of a survivor.

This is a compelling & heartbreaking memoir by a very inspirational & strong lady, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust & who had promised herself: "if I ever came out of that place, I was determined to do something that could change everything. I had to make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again to anybody. So 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.This is such an essential read, especially following the rise over recent years of antisemitism. As the years go by, there are fewer Holocaust survivors and it is vital their stories are told over and over again so that the world never forget, though people do not seem to have learnt the lessons of History.

I don't really know how to comment on this amazingly special, moving book. Everybody should read it. Lily had and has such an amazing spirit. The generosity of Lily sharing her harrowing, unbelievable experiences is a true gift. An important testimony. I learned such a lot. "The truth is, nobody was prepared for what happened. Relatively speaking, you could say we lived in cloud cuckoo land." And "How could you believe the unbelievable." The unbelievable cruelty of man against man. But we must. History can and does repeat itself. The generosity of Lily for me is that she is determined to tell us about things, even when there are "some things my mind no longer wants to recall." She shares details that are so intimate, personal: the moment her mother removes her shoes and passes them over to Lily. "The warmth of my mother's body was still in her shoes." Lily's mother has an inkling of the dreadful separation that is about to take place... I was reduced to tears so frequently whilst reading this book. I have no more words than thankyou, Lily and your amazing young grandson. Everybody should read this memoir.

This really was a good read.Unbelievable what happened and truly horrifying.Lily is an inspirational, amazing person.I recommend this book to anyone.