With her friendly manner and her smile and her twinkling eyes, Lily Ebert was always a favourite of my mother’s. They knew each other through their programme of educational events as Holocaust survivors. And for both of them, the week of Holocaust Memorial Day was always, as I would joke to Mum, “the busy season”.
But it was only when I read her recently published memoir, Lily’s Promise, that I realised that amiability was not the only reason why my mother particularly admired Mrs Ebert.
In many ways, the experiences of my mother — Mirjam Wiener — and Lily Ebert in the Holocaust were very different. The Wieners were German, lived in a big city, moved to Amsterdam. Their experience was that of Dutch Jews. The Eberts were Hungarian and lived in a smaller community. My mother went to Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen; the Eberts were sent to Auschwitz. My family were reform Jews; the Eberts were orthodox. Mrs Ebert lived for a long time in Israel; my mother came to Britain within two years of the end of the War.
Lily’s Promise, which sets all this out, is an unmissable book. The section on her direct experiences in Auschwitz is incredibly well done. It captures her encounters with evil (which must have been hard) and her emotions (which must have been harder). The way she looks after her sisters is central to her story and the readers shares the fear that at any moment they will be separated.
Among the stories of tragic death, there are also moments of incredible and uplifting reunion. The book makes your heart break, but at moments it makes your spirit soar, too.
And it deals with her postwar sense of dislocation particularly skilfully. It never gets diverted into the politics of the Middle East but it nevertheless makes Israel’s case incredibly powerfully. After Auschwitz, there was nowhere else for Lily Ebert to go. She builds a new life in Israel (disrupted by her husband’s illness, which brings her here). The idea that someone would then try to disrupt her new life with violence seems obscene to the reader.
I was also much taken with the parts of the book provided by Dov Forman, one of Mrs Ebert’s great grand-children. Mr Forman has, with great skill, created a social media presence for his great-grandmother’s story. Some have worried that social media campaigns privilege immediacy over depth of understanding. I don’t agree. Before someone can gain a deep understanding of something, they must first know it exists. Social media can be a very powerful way of introducing people to an issue.
As Mr Forman’s parts of the book show, it can also be an incredible way of linking up people involved in a particular Holocaust tale. I have had this experience myself and can testify to its importance.
But of her experiences after Auschwitz, it is her account of the creation of the Holocaust Survivor Centre that I found most striking.
Different experiences sometimes led to tensions between survivors. There are debates about whose experience was “worse”.
In Lily’s Promise, there is an account of the author being told off by someone who, like her, had survived Auschwitz. Apparently, because she was a Hungarian Jew, and had therefore been arrested later in the War, she didn’t really understand how bad things had been for people who had survived there for longer.
It reminded me of the response of a survivor, after hearing my mothers story, that Belsen had not had gas chambers or tattoos.
The temptation must have been strong in both my mother and Lily Ebert’s case to be angry with those saying these things. After all, both of them had lost their mothers in the camps and both of them had almost starved to death.
Yet they managed to avoid not only the error of comparing people’s Holocaust experience but also the error of being angry about others who did.
They both realised that survivor solidarity was vital, that people’s emotional reaction to their own suffering deserves infinite understanding, and that people aren’t perfect.
My mother always used to smile when someone asked her to rank different experiences, and gently reply, “It’s not a competition”. I think she could see this gentle compassion in Lily Ebert too.
Daniel Finkelstein is associate editor of The Times
