In the fall of 1938, shortly after Germany annexed Czechoslovakia’s border regions, including the town where his family lived, 3-year-old Petr Wolfgang Löw cried at the train station, inconsolable.
His parents had just told him he would not be able to bring his most prized possession – a shiny red tricycle with black handlebars – as they fled to relative safety in Prague.
Somehow Petr had managed to bring his birthday gift to the station unnoticed among the family’s suitcases, and 87 years later concentration camp survivor Gidon Lev still feels the sting of being forced to leave it behind.
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In an online world filled with vitriol, Gidon Lev – a Holocaust survivor, recent TikTok star, and a grandfather of 15 – continues to be a social media influencer who tries to teach where hate can lead, with a mix of stories, dancing, and humor.
“It’s one of the memories I have taken with me,” the former Petr says from the home in the Galilee where he now lives.
That train station trauma was the first of countless indignities, and worse, that Mr. Lev and his family experienced as they were swept into the gathering storm of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, which Israel marked Thursday, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Twenty-six family members were murdered, including his father.
Today Mr. Lev, who was imprisoned from age 6 to 10 at the Theresienstadt camp north of Prague, is a charismatic 90-year-old who had a recent high-profile run as a TikTok star and, last year, a disappointing encounter with Elon Musk at Auschwitz.
In an online world filled with vitriol, the father of six and grandfather of 15 continues to be a social media influencer who tries to teach where hate can lead with a mix of stories, dancing, and humor. His late-in-life journey as a Holocaust educator for the next generation includes a new memoir, “Let’s Make Things Better: A Holocaust Survivor’s Message of Hope and Celebration of Life,” and a documentary film in progress.
Although his life is bookended by major wars, and parts of the world are sliding toward authoritarianism, he holds close to his message: the “power of harnessing our past for a better future.” Cognizant that he is among the last living witnesses to the Holocaust, Mr. Lev looks back on that dark period for lessons.
“In many ways there are parallels that remind me of the hardship, of struggling, of surviving from day to day,” he observes, including “horrors in the world all over. And no less here.”
“Here” refers to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel’s southern border that killed some 1,200 people, the continued ordeal of Israeli hostages in Gaza, and Israel’s brutal, ongoing retaliatory war against Hamas in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed.
TikTok chapter
Mr. Lev’s decision to go on TikTok was encouraged by Julie Gray, an American writer he met after he hired her to edit an early draft of his memoir.
They soon became partners both in life and in telling his story across platforms. The appeal of going on social media, and TikTok in particular, was to reach a wider audience, the idea that current generations have a better chance of dealing with hate and fascism if they get to know someone who was a victim of these forces.
“My past is a warning to what can happen if you don’t speak up, if you close your ears and eyes,” says Mr. Lev.
Over the years, they have created a vast collection of content on both TikTok and Instagram for what they describe as a battle against Holocaust denial and antisemitism.
With Mr. Lev in front of the camera, and Ms. Gray behind it, they gained traction on TikTok, attracting over half a million followers and millions of views. One of his most-watched videos showed Mr. Lev dancing along TikTok-style answering, “3 questions a #Holocaust survivor gets asked all the time.”
But in November 2023 the pair deactivated the TikTok account after a barrage of hate-filled comments became too much to handle following the Oct. 7 attack.
“It became so virulently anti-Jewish, and anti-Israeli. It was just too much, we could not deal with it, especially Julie, who did not always let me see all the worst things people were saying because it was so terrible,” says Mr. Lev.
He cites the example of one viewer who commented, “You are a liar, this is all lies.”
“And my answer was: ‘My Dear Sir, I truly wish it was a lie because had it been a lie I would have had a childhood, a father, grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousins. But I had none of this because they were all murdered – 26 members of my family I lost, at least, maybe even more.’”
Of the family, only Mr. Lev and his mother, Doris, survived. They were imprisoned from 1941 to 1945 at Theresienstadt, known as a way station for most there, who were eventually sent to death camps.
Mr. Lev, who was severely malnourished, witnessed public executions and the beating and torture of fellow inmates. His father, Ernst, was separated from them, used by the Nazis as a slave miner, and eventually deported to Auschwitz. In the final weeks of the war, in January 1945 as Soviet troops advanced, Ernst Lev was put on a “death march” from Auschwitz toward Germany. He died 10 days before Auschwitz was liberated.
“Just 10 days between life and death,” says Mr. Lev.
At Auschwitz with Elon Musk
In January 2024, Mr. Lev and Ms. Gray flew to Poland to join a private tour of Auschwitz with Mr. Musk at the invitation of the European Jewish Association. It was Mr. Lev’s first trip to Poland, a country he had previously avoided, because, as he says, it is “soaked” with the blood of his family.
At the time, Mr. Musk, owner of X, was facing criticism about the way his social media platform handled antisemitic posts and because he himself had endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, for which he then apologized.
Mr. Lev says he had hoped to interact with and help educate Mr. Musk, but instead, he says, the tech billionaire never asked him any questions or spoke to him at all after they were introduced.
“I was being used as a prop,” he says he realized later. “I did not have a single real conversation or exchange with Musk. He could have asked, ‘Where were you during the war, Gidon?’ But nothing, he asked nothing at all.”
Last month, among the flowering trees of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Emek, a red carpet was rolled out in honor of Mr. Lev’s arrival for a sneak preview of the documentary being made about him. Walking with a cane and recovering from a recent illness, Mr. Lev could not resist doing a little jig as stepped upon it to the cheers of friends and family.
“There were many moments in my life that were difficult and challenging,” he told them. “But I’m still here.”
Later, reflecting on the situation in a world he has always tried to improve, he said, “Many people feel we can do better. And we must do better. It’s people who create the problems, and it’s people who can solve them.”
In his new memoir, he writes: “To me, hard times are like hide-and-seek – where is the solution, where is the hope? We can never give up looking for these things because they are just waiting to be found.”
