Foreign Affairs

‘I Want To Show Them’: Holocaust Survivor Explains Why She Never Removed The Tattoo The Nazis Gave Her

No featured image available

Lily Ebert, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, explained why she never removed the tattoo Nazis gave her at Auschwitz while appearing on “Good Morning Britain” on Thursday.

“I have never thought about it, to remove. I want to show the world because … to see something or to hear about it, it makes a big difference,” Ebert said on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “And the world should know how deep humans can go.”

“The fellow humans give a tattoo and say, ‘You are not a human’ … You were a tattoo, you were a number, not more nor less,” she said. “Another human can take away my humanity. They are not humans.”

Ebert gained a following of 1.6 million users on TikTok, where she largely talks about how she survived the Holocaust, CBS News reported. She arrived at the concentration camp at the age of 20, and guards took away her mother, her brother and one of her sisters to gas chambers the same afternoon.

“What really happened in our darkest moment, we wouldn’t think of that,” Ebert told CBS News. “It was not in our mind that something like that can happen.”

Ebert started the TikTok account with her grandson, Dov Forman, while under lockdown in 2020 and soon went viral, CBS News reported. A video of Ebert displaying her identification number tattoo received over 20 million views.

“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. The two influencers, who live in London, authored a book called “Lily’s Promise,” with a foreword by Prince Charles, and they met U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson at Downing Street.

“I was really not sure that I would stay alive. It is a miracle that I am here. But I promised myself, however long I will be alive, and whatever I will do in life, one thing is sure, I will tell my story,” Ebert said. “I thought single-handedly, I will tell my story and I will change the world.”