Lilly Appelbaum Malnik

Lilly Appelbaum Malnik (born 5 November 1928) is a Belgian-American Holocaust survivor who helped create the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was captured by Nazi soldiers in 1944, during the German occupation of Belgium, and was imprisoned at the Mechelen transit camp in Belgium, Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland, and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 by the British Army. Malnik's mother, two siblings, aunt and uncle, and grandaunt and granduncle were all killed during The Holocaust in Belgium. After World War II, she emigrated to the United States and was reunited with her father. She married Abraham Malnik, a Soviet Holocaust survivor, and they assisted in the founding of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With her granddaughter, the American social media content creator Miriam Ezagui, Malnik has made TikTok videos detailing life in concentration camps.

Early life Lilly Appelbaum Malnik was born to Belgian Jewish parents in Antwerp on 5 November 1928. Her parents separated prior to her birth.

While imprisoned, she befriended a Christian girl from France named Christiane who had been caught in a roundup by mistake. Throughout the march, she witnessed German soldiers shooting at prisoners. They married and had three sons. Malnik's husband, who died in 2007,

She later lived in Florida before moving to Clarksville, Maryland during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in order to be closer to her family.

She has shared her experiences during the Holocaust on her granddaughter, Miriam Ezagui,'s TikTok account. One video, where Malnik discussed drugs given to female inmates at Auschwitz to prevent them from menstruating, received over 23.3 million views. Her testimony was included in a study on infertility among Holocaust survivors by a Canadian professor. In her speech, she spoke about the importance of remembering more than six million Jewish people who were killed during The Holocaust in Europe, including her own family members.