At 98, Lily Ebert is perhaps the oldest user of the video-sharing social network app, TikTok.
However, unlike many who post trivial videos on life lessons and heartbreaks, Ebert uses the platform to describe the horrors of the Holocaust.
And the viewers receive her videos with love and appreciation. A clip of Ebert showing her identification number tattoo got more than 20 million views.
Ebert’s tattoo has the number—A-10572—on her forearm. “We were not humans. We were only a number,” she said in her video.
Soon, many of her brief clips went viral. And now, she boasts of more than 1.6 million followers.
Ebert was only 20 when her family was taken from their hometown in Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau—one of the largest Nazi death camps.
Her mother, younger brother and younger sister were immediately taken to the gas chambers and killed. Ebert was sent to work in the camp where she spent four horrifying months.
“People would say four months isn’t so long,” she can be heard as saying in one of her videos.
“But let me tell you something. Even four minutes was too long.”
Ebert wanted her story to be heard by millions of people but didn’t know how to do it.
It was her 18-year-old great-grandson, Dov Forman, who came up with the idea of creating a TikTok account during the 2020 lockdowns.
“I said to my great-grandmother, ‘If they can go viral for dancing, why can’t we go viral for sharing these really important messages?’” Forman told CBS news.
Ebert and Forman, who live in London, have authored a book called “Lily’s Promise,” with a foreword by Prince Charles.
They have even met UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Downing Street, the CBS reported.
(With inputs from agencies)
