Lily's Promise
The Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller
The incredibly moving and powerful memoir of an Auschwitz survivor who made headlines around the world. With a foreword by King Charles III.
'Unforgettable' – Daily Mail
When Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert was liberated in 1945, a Jewish-American soldier gave her a banknote on which he’d written ‘Good luck and happiness’. And when her great-grandson, Dov, decided to use social media to track down the family of the GI, 96-year-old Lily found herself making headlines round the world. Lily had promised herself that if she survived Auschwitz she would tell everyone the truth about the camp. Now was her chance.
In Lily’s Promise she writes movingly about her happy childhood in Hungary, the death of her mother and two youngest siblings on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944 and her determination to keep her two other sisters safe. She describes the inhumanity of the camp and the small acts of defiance that gave her strength. From there she and her sisters became slave labour in a munitions factory, and then faced a death march that they barely survived.
Lily lost so much, but she built a new life for herself and her family, first in Israel and then in London. It wasn’t easy; the pain of her past was always with her. But this extraordinary woman found the strength to speak out in the hope that such evil would never happen again.
'Utterly compelling, heartbreaking, truthful and yet redemptive, a memoir of the Holocaust, a testimony of irrepressible spirit and an unforgettable family chronicle, written in lucid prose by a truly remarkable woman . . . I couldn't stop reading it' – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography
Lily Ebert lives in London near her large and loving family, which includes thirty-four great-grandchildren. She is a founder member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education. Lily’s Promise is her powerful memoir.
Dov Forman is Lily’s great-grandson. At the age of sixteen he was separated from her during the Covid pandemic for the first time, and became determined to record her story for posterity.