A 97-year-old Holocaust survivor has been inundated with antisemitic abuse on social media since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza, her family has said.
Lily Ebert was still a teenager when she was deported from her home in Hungary to Auschwitz. She was liberated two years later while on a death march to a munitions factory, having been forced to walk for days without shoes, food or water.
Now living in north London, she speaks to young people about the “importance of tolerance and love”. Her teenage great-grandson, Dov Forman, said her pages on social media had been swamped with “messages of hate”, including posts praising Hitler and celebrating the murder of six million Jews.
Forman posted: “Over the past few days my great-grandmother, [an] Auschwitz survivor, and I have continued to receive messages of hate on TikTok and Twitter. We will not allow this to stop us from educating about the horrors of the past, and what hatred can lead to. Hate only breeds hate.”
Messages posted on her feeds included ones that read “Happy Holocaust”, “Peace be upon Hitler” and “Ask her if she thinks the treatment of Palestinians reminds her [of] the treatment she got in the camp”.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said that her TikTok account, dedicated to answering questions about the Holocaust, was targeted.
Forman said last week that he “woke up to many private messages saying that ‘Hitler was right and should have finished all Jews, including my great-grandmother’ ”.
He tweeted in January that she had made a “miraculous recovery” from Covid-19. Last year he managed to track down the children of one of her liberators after identifying him from words of hope written on a banknote.
Forman has been posting on social media about his great-grandmother’s experiences during the Holocaust, to share her story while she is still alive and ensure that her message is passed on to future generations.
