Herbert Heller harbored a secret for decades.
The Czech immigrant whose San Rafael store, Heller’s for Children, attracted shoppers for 53 years, kept to himself that he survived the Holocaust. He lost his father and his brother at Auschwitz; he himself was able to escape during the 1945 death march from the camp. The sheer terror and trauma of those years was not something he could talk about, even with his family. Until later in life, when he suddenly discovered his voice, and the man who had been so reticent to discuss his personal pain became a much sought-after speaker, telling his story to youth around the Bay Area.
Heller died in 2021 at 92 but he lived long enough to know what was coming: The Optimist. Written and directed by Richmond filmmaker Finn Taylor (Dreams with the Fishes, Unleashed), the drama jumps back and forth between the World War II era and the early 2000s as the elderly Heller tells his story to Abby (Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade), a troubled teen. Tony-nominated actor Stephen Lang, best known to film audiences for his role as Quaritch in the Avatar franchise, plays the older Heller with Luke David Blumm (The King of Staten Island) as adolescent Herbert.
The Optimist really begins with producer Jeanine Thomas, who long wanted to bring Heller’s story to the screen. She was familiar with Taylor’s work and approached him after his film and live performance piece Kannapolis played at the 2018 Mill Valley Film Festival. At the time, she was looking for a screenwriter, someone who could take the facts of Heller’s life and find some way to dramatize them.
“There have been so many impactful films made about the Holocaust, but two things drew me in as a writer,” Taylor says over a recent Zoom call. “One was that this man kept his secret for 60 years, which I later found out was quite common among survivors.
“So, the idea of holding on to a secret until you’re in your early 70s, even from your children and your family, was compelling, but then seeing that he took his trauma and used it as a service. I went to see him speak at a high school and you know, they all had their cell phones right there, but none were picked up. They were transfixed the entire time, and I would just see these kids going up to him afterwards, eager to talk to him.”
Thomas flew Taylor to Eastern Europe for research. He visited Terezin and Auschwitz, the two camps where the family was interned, as well as Prague where the Hellers lived before the war. He also got to know Heller.
“I feel the world is lacking, particularly from men right now, heroes that lead with kindness and gentleness and a power of grace. Herbert had the power of having gone through a door that most of us will never go through,” Taylor says. “He had that knowledge, and yet, at the same time, he would always make a joke. You know, he wouldn’t only give you one piece of chocolate. When I went to his house, I think every time he gave me an entire box of chocolates.”
The character of Abby is a fiction, at least partly. She is an amalgam of the many teenagers whose lives Heller touched. In addition to The Optimist, Taylor is making a documentary about Heller—among the things uncovered during research from that project were letter after letter from kids. There were also the stories of the teens that would approach him after a lecture.
“The first time he spoke, a girl came up to him and said, ‘I have this suicide note I had written for my parents, and now I’ve heard you speak, and you’ve changed my mind.’ Every time, he would speak, it was either kids who were suicidal or kids who were doing self-harm. You know, I used to work with emotionally disturbed kids, and you could just see the magnetic line that they would draw to him.”
Originally titled Avenue of the Giants, the film largely shot on location in Eastern Europe. But pivotal scenes take place between Herbert and Abby among the Bay Area’s towering redwoods. For those scenes, Taylor could only film in his own backyard.
“I’m local and whenever I go away, I yearn for redwoods and sequoias,” Taylor says. “When we looked at the surrounding areas in Prague, there’s no place that looked like Marin. That is where Herbert chose to live and Tam High and Redwood High were the places he spoke.
“More than that, if you visit Auschwitz in the present day, it’s this kind of barren deathscape… I knew we were going to spend a lot of time there, and I thought [the forest] is a polar opposite. But also, I knew about things like the immortal trees, and how these massive, the tallest trees in the world, have very shallow roots, and the only reason they withstand things for 1000s of years, is all of the roots are interconnected. They are a giant interconnected community. And I think visually the contrast really works.”
Heller died before Taylor started shooting The Optimist. Even so, whether Taylor was shooting in Prague or Marin, Heller remained a presence. “I felt even though he had passed, Herbert was our guiding compass,” Taylor says. “My compass point was always Herbert’s story.”
THE OPTIMIST opens Wednesday, March 11.
