For 60 years, Holocaust survivor Herbert Heller kept silent about the nightmares he endured. Imprisoned at Auschwitz as a child with his family, he never saw his father Karel and brother Heinz again. He escaped a death march, reunited with his mother Melanie in their native Prague, and immigrated to the United States, where he established a successful children’s store.

As he married and raised a family, he stayed mum about a mysterious scar — it was where his concentration camp number was tattooed before he used acid to remove it. Decades later, he broke his silence. Not only did he speak about his Holocaust narrative in an oral history project, he discussed it in life-changing presentations for teenage audiences in schools. Now, the late survivor is the subject of a new feature film, “The Optimist.”

Premiering in select US theaters on March 11, “The Optimist” incorporates the real-life narrative of Herbert, who is played by actor Stephen Lang of the “Avatar” franchise. In “Avatar,” Lang is the villainous Col. Miles Quaritch, but in “The Optimist,” he’s a California toy-store owner with a big heart and an equally big secret, which he begins to disclose in sit-down interviews with a teenage project volunteer named Abbey. A recording of Herbert’s actual interview is available through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

For the character of Abbey, producer Jeanine Thomas and writer-director Finn Taylor created a composite of teenagers whom Heller impacted through his presentations. Played by Elsie Fisher of “Eighth Grade,” Abbey has her own troubled background that includes a suicide attempt.

Proceeds from the film will benefit Bring Change to Mind, an organization co-founded by actress Glenn Close that aims to destigmatize teen mental health issues, and Kavod, a group that helps indigent Holocaust survivors. Thomas cited grim statistics related to both demographics: Of the 35,000 Holocaust survivors in the US, more than 11,000 live in poverty, while suicide is the second-leading cause of death for individuals ages 10 to 34.

Currently a resident of Maine, Thomas’s trajectory includes teaching maximum-security inmates at a California prison, working in the fields of tech, education and psychology, and raising four children. She met Herbert in 2014, helped him share his story with youth and eventually decided to make a film about him. Yet the road was difficult. In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors and was then........

© The Times of Israel