The Optimist

In January 1945, the SS, the Nazis’ paramilitary enforcers at the death camps, marched 60,000 of their Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners westward, away from advancing Soviet troops. Those too weak to continue were shot. Young teen Herbert Heller, who spent three years at Auschwitz, makes a miraculous escape from the infamous death march, a secret he keeps for 60 years. Stephen Lang renders the complexity of the aging Heller’s emotions as he unveils his story in graphic, poignant detail to a young woman (Elsie Fisher) repressing her own traumatized past.