Felix Opatowski

Felix Opatowski was born to a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. He and his family were confined by the Nazis to the Łódź Ghetto during World War II. At age 15, he took on the dangerous job of smuggling goods out of the ghetto in exchange for food for his starving family. In 1943, he was deported to a forced labor camp in Rawiczs and then to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There he was recruited as a runner for the Polish Underground and implicated in the plot to blow up the camp crematoria. For this, he was beaten and tortured. His parents and 10-year-old brother were killed, but Felix survived to be liberated in Austria by U.S. troops in May 1945. He worked at an American army base, where he married his wife Regina in 1947. In 1949, the couple and the first of their children emigrated to Canada, settling in Toronto. He has spoken to thousands of students across the country about the Holocaust. His memoir Gatehouse to Hell (French translation, L’Antichambre de l’enfer) was published in 2012 by the Azrieli Foundation as part of its Series of Holocaust Survivor Memoirs. He also wrote a book about the Auschwitz uprising entitled October 7, 1944, and was featured in the documentary, Following in Felix's Footsteps (2007).