Not just another Holocaust story

Prisoner number 143425: Those digits are still tattooed on Felix Opatowski’s left arm, but it is not as if the Holocaust survivor will ever forget what he went through.

At a young age, Opatowski was sent to the Lodz camp in Poland. For four years of the Nazi regime, he was sent from one concentration camp to the next, suffering from hunger and inhumane living and working conditions. His mother and brother perished in one of the camps. Opatowski, on the other hand, survived. And he did something not many Holocaust survivors have done.

More than 60 years after the Holocaust, Opatowski travelled back to the places he had come to fear the most. “It was like going back to hell,” he said. In September 2009, Opatowski visited all of the six camps he was a part of, along with his wife and a couple they met during a trip to Israel. “I wanted to be able to visit all the camps that I was incarcerated in to say Kaddish one more time,” he said.

His journey back to the camps is retold in a mini-documentary, Following in the Footsteps of Felix Opatwoski. The film was made in hopes of becoming a TV special or a DVD and promote Opatowski’s third book.

The hour-long documentary follows Opatowski’s visit to the camps as he describes intimate details of his experiences—from the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz to his liberation on May 5, 1945. He reveals the system he created with his fellow prisoners to smuggle food. He recounts his unbeknownst involvement in the Polish Underground that burned down two crematoriums. Opatowski also shares how he survived the Holocaust. He says, “I just got lucky.”

Though Opatowski admits he has not found much luck in securing funding for the film, his life story has touched countless others. A tour guide named Siggy, for example, made a commemorative candle for Opatowski during the 65th anniversary of his liberation. Siggy met Opatowski and his wife while touring Vienna with a Christian-Jewish tour group. Touched by his story, she created a candle which included Opatowski’s prisoner number, camp locations and date of liberation.

Today, Opatowski and his family reside in Toronto. He says another trip back to the camps is not out of the question but, “it takes a part of me every time I do go.” Nevertheless, there is one factor that has helped him cope over the years: time. Opatowski says, “Time is a healer which helps survivors physically, morally and spiritually.”

Reprinted with permission from Shalom Life