A ninety-nine-year-old Jewish great-grandmother has been awarded an MBE (Member of the order of the British Empire) by the UK's King Charles III.
Lily Ebert was transported to Auschwitz from Hungary at the age of 20, toward the end of the war, and lost most of her family in the camp. After being liberated, she spent a year in Switzerland before arriving in Israel in 1946. In 1967 she moved to the United Kingdom with her husband.
Ebert was a founding member of the UK's Holocaust Survivor Centre, and was accorded the honor in recognition of her contribution to Holocaust education.
Among her family members accompanying Lily to Windsor Castle to receive the award was her 19-year-old great-grandson Dov, who stressed the importance of Holocaust witnesses relating their experiences, as "the number of survivors is dwindling, and everyone who listens to a witness becomes a witness himself."
"Words cannot explain how much this means to me," Ebert said at the occasion. "I promised myself that if I survived, I would tell the whole world what happened to us in Auschwitz, that there were people killed for no other reason than their beliefs, because we were believed not to be worthy of life."
She added that, "Youngsters really want to learn and they should learn" about the Holocaust.