Lily’s Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live (Macmillan, 2021) by Lily Ebert and Dov Forman
Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein
This book really hit home—and not
just because I read the whole thing over Tisha B’Av. The protagonist of
this largely autobiographical Holocaust book is a scion of the famed Engelman
family from the Hungary town of Bonyhad. The Engelmans lived there for centuries,
where the Jewish community seems to have been established in the mid 1700’s.
The Engelmans were even the first signatories on the document that officially
established the Orthodox Community of Bonyhad as a breakaway from the Neolog Community.
Throughout the generations, the Engelmans have proven themselves to be
resilient, brave, and steadfast Jews, and Lily’s story simply follows that trajectory.
[By the way, other prominent members of the extended Engelman family include Benjamin
Engelman, a well-known nuclear physicist in Jerusalem, and his son Mordechai
Matanyahu Engelman, the current State Comptroller/Ombudsman of Israel.]
Lily’s story opens with a vivid
description of her idyllic childhood and upbringing in the quaint Hungary town
of Bonyhad. She was the oldest of several siblings, and was doted on by her
loving parents. Already from a young age, Lily shows herself to be a
responsible and reliable doer, as well as a figure to whom her younger siblings
looked up. Although for most of Hungarian Jewry, the tragedies only began in
1944 when the Nazis occupied Hungary, for Lily’s family the first tragedy came
in 1942 with the death of their father. On her father’s deathbed, Lily promised
that she will take care of her siblings—a promise which she truly kept.
And then in the summer of 1944,
the Jews of Bonyhad were rounded up and confined to the makeshift ghetto — before
they were quickly deported to Auschwitz, where most of them sadly perished (on
the 18th of Tammuz). Lily too was forced into the ghetto and then
deported to Auschwitz, along with her mother and siblings. In one of the most
moving scenes in the book, Lily’s mother gives over her shoes (in whose soles was
hidden precious jewelry) as she realizes that she will not survive the camps, leaving
it to Lily to figuratively walk in her mother’s shoes.
Along the arduous and grueling
path that her story took, Lily held steadfast to her faith and to her
responsibility to her younger sisters. She literally held the hands of her two
younger sisters, Piri and Rene, as they survived together the concentration
camp at Auschwitz and the forced labor at Alternburg. At the end of the war,
they were liberated by soldiers from the American Army, who led them into
freedom. Lily and her sisters were directly aided by the efforts of the
legendary US Army chaplain, Rabbi Herschel Schacter (1917–2013), who helped
them find refuge and recovery in Switzerland; and from Switzerland they found
their way to the British Mandate of Palestine through the efforts of Agudas
Yisrael.
The Engelman sisters were later
reunited with their lone surviving brother Imre (Imi), who eventually joined
them in Israel after having been held up under the Soviets for several years.
Lily’s mother and other siblings did not survive the horrors of the Nazis. Lily
and her sisters settled in the Holy Land and married, with Lily wedding a
fellow Hungarian immigrant Shmuel Ebert, with whom she established a family in Tel
Aviv. Eventually, with Shmuel’s health failing, the Eberts moved to London,
where they have by now established multiple generations of God-fearing Jews.
After the death of her husband,
Lily became more open to the idea of publicly speaking about the Holocaust and
her experiences during the war years. She frequented the speaking circuit and
was a common guest at schools where she lectured about the Holocaust. However,
during the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020, all of this came to halt, as the
lockdowns prevented public gatherings and essentially confined her to her home.
This is where the book’s co-author Dov Forman comes in. He is Lily’s
great-grandson and a high school student in London. He teamed up with his spunky
nonagenarian ancestor to research some aspects of her story on social media,
and eventually they wrote this book together to bring her story to a wider
audience.
This book was especially
meaningful to me because my own grandmother, Roszi Klein (nee Kuttner), also hailed
from Bonyhad. In fact, my grandmother’s older sister, Sari Blau (nee Kuttner),
who currently lives in Brooklyn, was Lily’s classmate and is even mentioned in
her book (on page 162). Her husband, the late Leslie Blau (1921–2021), wrote Bonyhad: A Destroyed Community (Shengold, 1994), so many of the characters that
appear in Lily’s story (like the endearing town doctor Dr. Litzman and the
Engelman girls themselves) were already familiar to me through his work. For
those who want to be inspired by a tale of resilience, bravery, and commitment,
Lily’s Promise is an excellent choice.
