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 found to have Stage 4 cancer.

“[In] truth, the cancer was a gift to really get this film done and out to the world,” Thomas told The Times of Israel over Zoom. “I really feel like it was a gift from above, to help me decide to make this film and follow through, even when things seemed impossible.”

That same year, once she was medically cleared to fly, Thomas went to California to see Herbert.

“I said, ‘This film will be made, you will be known, your story will be shared,’” Thomas said. “He passed a month later [at age 92].”

Shot amid the redwoods of Marin County and the streetscapes of Prague, with music composed by director Taylor’s cousin Jenny Scheinman, the film presents a story of hidden narratives. Its focus on the Holocaust is important to Taylor — he and Scheinman have the Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor in their family tree. And it is important to Thomas, who went to a Catholic college but later in life discovered through genealogical testing that she is 50 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. She also said that her war-veteran grandfather had his own hidden story, but unlike Herbert, did not speak about it: He served in World War II, was imprisoned in a Stalag camp in Austria and came back changed for the worse.

Herbert, Thomas said, “was the complete opposite. He was not a monster when he was triggered. If anything, when he was triggered, it made him want to move forward in life, more optimistic and hopeful, and with love. And I really thought that was just unbelievable to see, with everything he had been through.”

As Herbert indicates in the film, he got this optimism from his beloved engineer father. Karel took his sons to the circus and, outweighing any potential risk, even let young Herbert steer the family car.

“Herbert idolized his father,” Taylor told The Times of Israel in a separate Zoom interview. The veteran indie-film director called Karel an “incredibly positive person … a brilliant person.”

Yet Karel’s optimism betrayed him. There were warning signs in Prague: Increasing antisemitism from Herbert’s classmates and from Wehrmacht soldiers in the streets. Karel deemed the occupiers a temporary inconvenience. He was proven wrong when they forced the Hellers, and many other Prague Jews, to leave their homes for deportation to the camps. In the film, some chose suicide instead.

“Sometimes our greatest strength — which I believe was [Karel’s] optimism — could also be a vulnerability, which was not leaving [Prague] when he had the chance,” Taylor said, noting that Karel’s more hardheaded brother fled prewar Prague for England.

In the film, Herbert tells Abbey that life was relatively tolerable at the first camp he was sent to — Theresienstadt. The Nazis created Theresienstadt as a model camp, with a vegetable garden and musicians, to convince the world that all German concentration camps were humanely run. In one scene, Herbert is moved by a camp concert led by Viktor Ullmann, the prominent Austrian composer, pianist and conductor. While it is not known whether Heller and Ullmann interacted in real life, their time at Theresienstadt coincided. So did their time at Auschwitz, from which Ullmann never emerged.

At Auschwitz, the Nazis collected prisoners’ hair into gruesome piles, the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele conducted unspeakable experiments on identical twins, and inmates who tried to escape were executed. Escape was near impossible: An electrified fence surrounded the camp. At one point, Herbert considers touching it, but decides against it.

Eventually, the approaching Russian army compelled the Nazis to evacuate Auschwitz and lead its inmates on a death march west, within the ever-shrinking boundaries of occupied Europe. Herbert marches alongside fellow inmate Mr. Waldman, who urges him on with a quote from Pirkei Avot, or Ethics of the Fathers: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” They spot an abandoned knapsack. Mr. Waldman performs an act of self-sacrifice that allows Herbert to grab it, swap out his striped uniform for the clothes inside, and escape. He makes his way to Prague, where a kindly Catholic neighbor woman shelters him, and where he miraculously encounters his mother.

Abbey eventually feels comfortable enough in Herbert’s presence — and by his mention of the fence at Auschwitz — to share her own brush with suicidal thoughts and discuss survivor’s guilt. Ignored and belittled by her divorced parents, bullied by classmates, she found refuge in photography and music, and bonded with a fellow young artist named Sabrina. Yet Sabrina has her own demons, and cannot escape them.

In a poignant scene, an emotionally scarred Abbey does not show up at her customary time to interview Herbert. Once Herbert learns this, he drives off in his Lexus in search of her. When he finally finds her, they have a heart-to-heart.

Although the bond between Herbert and Abbey is fictional, in real life Herbert did indeed impact the lives of countless teenagers — one of whom recognized him during filming and rushed over to greet him, as shown in a sweet scene during the credits.

“Sometimes, teenagers feel that ‘no one can understand my pain,’” Taylor reflected. “Then they hear his story … But it wasn’t just that he was a survivor and had this incredible story. He was an incredibly graceful, kind person. He was the kind of hero who had the strength of depth and kindness.”

Are you relying on The Times of Israel for accurate and timely coverage of the Iran war right now? If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6/month, you will:

Support our independent journalists who are working around the clock under difficult conditions to cover this conflict;

Read ToI with a clear, ads-free experience on our site, apps and emails; and

Gain access to exclusive content shared only with the ToI Community, including weekly letters from founding editor David Horovitz.

We’re really pleased that you’ve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month.

You clearly find our careful reporting of the Iran war valuable, at a time when facts are often distorted and news coverage often lacks context.

Your support is essential to continue our work. We want to continue delivering the professional journalism you value, even as the demands on our newsroom have grown dramatically during this ongoing conflict.

So today, please consider joining our reader support group, The Times of Israel Community. For as little as $6 a month you'll become our partners while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members.

Thank you,David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel

1 Billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg is US’s biggest donor of 2025

2 Israel has surpassed UK as 7th-largest global arms exporter, report shows

3 InterviewIn Tehran he fooled the regime, in Israel he built an empire. Now he prays for a new Iran

4 Iran vows to fight ‘as long as it takes,’ threatens Trump with ‘elimination’

5 Iran’s new supreme leader was injured in legs on 1st day of war – report

6 Iran has fired some 300 missiles at Israel, about half with cluster bomb warheads — IDF

7 EssayA long road to the end: The death throes of Iran’s regime could last for years

8 Saudi Aramco warns of ‘catastrophic consequences’ unless Strait of Hormuz opens

Holocaust survivor testimony

© The Times of Israel