Born Peter Löw in 1935 in Karlovy Vary, Gidon Lev survived with his mother during the Shoah, after four years of internment in Terezín/Theresienstadt, while 26 members of his family were killed. After the war, he left Czechoslovakia in 1948, first to New York, then to Toronto and settled in Israel in the late 1950s. After he published two books with his partner Julie Gray about his story, Gidon Lev – who celebrates his 90th birthday on March 3 – became  a phenomenon on social media, with almost half a million followers on TikTok.