Lily Ebert, 90, survived the Holocaust. Now her 16-year-old great-grandson, Dov Forman, is helping her document her experiences and post some of them for the world to see on Twitter.
She recently told him a story of a U.S soldier who was so kind to her and her sisters. He actually gave them some of his own money to help them get started and she still has the German banknote where he had written an inspirational messages of kindness on it.
It says “a start to a new life! good luck and happiness”
Lily says "He was the first person who was kind to us in years and actually the first man who wasn't an enemy."
Dov posted a picture of the bill and a picture of a reunion she had with him a few months later on Twitter and joked to his great-grandmother that he would find out who the soldier was within 24 hours. And he was right! It didn’t take long for replies to pour in identifying the GI as Private Hyman Schulman.
Hyman died back in 2011 in NJ at 96 years old according to his obituary.
Hyman was rather easy for the folks of Twitter to track down because he had also wrote “assistant to Chaplain Schacter” on the bill.
Herschel Schacter was a very prominent religious figure during WWII who had a team that worked with liberated Jews as they left the concentration camps according to his Wikipedia page.
There were only a dozen or so service men that worked as his assistant so people who knew him were able to pick out Hyman rather easily from the photo.
Lily and her family got to meet Hyman's children virtually in a Zoom call this week. "It means so much that we can now connect with the family," Lily says.