A Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Dr Gilly Carr (2006), is interviewing Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert and her great-grandson, Dov Forman, ahead of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.
Lily is a founder member of the Holocaust Survivors Centre and was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education. She and Dov jointly authored ‘Lily’s Promise’ (2021, Macmillan), now a Sunday Times bestseller.
Lily was born in Bonyhád, Hungary, in 1923, but after the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 she, her mother and younger siblings were sent to Auschwitz; only Lily and her two sisters survived. Lily’s Promise has the distinction of following Lily’s life after the war, first in Switzerland, then Israel and then London. It allows us to see the impact of the Holocaust on four generations of her family.
A-level student Dov decided to spend the first lockdown finding out about more about Lily’s story. He created a Twitter page to share Lily’s testimony, which has had over 50 million views to date, and has even managed to track down the family of the US soldier who liberated Lily from a death march. In February 2021, Dov set up a Tiktok account together with Lily, which now has over 1.3 million followers.
Dr Carr is a University Associate Professor and Academic Director in Archaeology at the Institute of Continuing Education. She is also a member of the 12-strong UK delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and currently chairs an international five-year IHRA project on the subject of Holocaust and Roma genocide sites, entitled 'Safeguarding Sites: the IHRA Charter for best practice'. This project aims to create heritage guidelines for international adoption and runs from 2019–2024.
