Dan Snow's History Hit - The Boy Who Hid in the Woods: How I Survived the Holocaust

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence.Maxwell Smart was just a boy when the Nazis came for him and his family. Within a few weeks, he would find himself alone, living in the woods of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. This is the astonishing story of his survival, told by Maxwell himself and documentary filmmaker Rebecca Snow.Rebecca directed the feature film The Boy in the Woods, based on Maxwell's memoir of the same name.Produced by James Hickmann, Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today on the podcast we have a story about the Holocaust. We have a story about a young boy called Maxwell. His family survived several sweeps of the ghetto looking for Jews. They'd hidden, but on this occasion they were betrayed, they were found. Maxwell saw his grandpa murdered in front of his own eyes. He was imprisoned with his mother and sister until the day came when they too would be taken away. Maxwell's mother told him to run, and he did. We're now pretty certain that Maxwell's mother and sister were driven up to a nearby

hillside and murdered by the Nazis. Maxwell survived, and this is the story of that survival. It's a story that I've come to know well recently, because my sister, who's a documentary filmmaker in Canada, Rebecca Snow, worked with Maxwell, made a documentary about his astonishing story of survival and consequences of that survival that ripple down to the present day. The documentary was so well received that my brilliant sister was able to raise money to make a film, a movie about it. And that movie, The Boy in the Woods, is now showing on screens across Canada and on Apple TV in the UK. In this episode, I talk to my sister about Maxwell's story, but I'm also lucky enough to talk to the man himself. Now, deep into his 90s, Maxwell Smart, the name he took following his immigration to Canada, following the Second World War.

He wrote the beautiful book, The Boy in the Woods, about his experiences, and he talks about the trauma he suffered, what he witnessed, what he survived during the war in an astonishing way that's now been given the prominence it deserves. I'm very proud of my sister, Rebecca, a first-time movie director and writer for The Boy in the Woods movie, and it was a great honour to talk to Maxwell Smart. Here they both are. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Beck, it's so good to have you on the podcast. I remember just how intense these experiences were for you as you researched and made this documentary. It became your whole life.

Tell me about the story of Max. Where does it begin? Yeah, so Max was born in Buczacz, which was Eastern Poland at the time. It's now actually Western Ukraine, but at the time it was Eastern Poland. He was born in 1930. And so Buczacz was this thriving city. It had a Jewish population of about 8,000. And there was a huge, great synagogue there. And he remembers going to

synagogue with his family. And he remembers Shabbat with big family, like 60 people in his family in Buczacz. And he's at school. And when he is nine years old, the war breaks out. Germany invades Poland. He is in the part of Europe, of course, in Eastern Europe that's occupied by the Soviets. And so he remembers being under Soviet rule. He remembers still being able to go to school. He remembers he had Jewish and non-Jewish friends. His dad ended up running a sort of clothing co-op for the Soviets. So his dad was in sort of good standing during the Soviet occupation. And he doesn't remember life being too terrible for Jews during the Soviet occupation.

I know there are other stories from other Jews who did find it a lot more oppressive, but Max remembers it not being too bad compared to what was coming. And then, of course, a couple of years later, Operation Barbarossa. And so the Germans are heading towards Buczacz and the Soviets start retreating. And Maxwell has a memory of the tanks kind of thundering down his street and everyone inside the houses just not knowing what was going to happen. At this point, he said they hadn't really heard the horror stories of exactly what had been going on in Western Europe and Western Poland. They weren't quite sure what was coming, the Jewish population.

But he does remember them all staying in their house. They didn't go out for days. And he remembers the tanks kind of thundering down their street. About 11 years old. It's 1941. Yeah, he's 11 years old. Exactly. Yeah.

And how quickly do things change for the Jewish population of this town? Very quickly. One of the things that he talks about happening very quickly are sort of bands of Ukrainian nationalists kind of taking to the streets as the Germans roll in, celebrating, and then starting to loot and sack, you know, Jewish homes. And that's quite an important part of the story because it's actually his principal tormentors are actually people in German uniforms and SS guys. It's actually Ukrainian nationalists who want to be rid of communists, rid of the Soviets, but also were terribly anti-Semitic as well. Yeah, terribly anti-Semitic. And I think they thought that they were going to have a sort of independent, like a Ukrainian state. And so these

sort of bands of Ukrainians who came out of the woodwork to celebrate the Germans coming into their city, I think they were really wanting to have a sort of national state next to Nazi Germany. They thought that this was a great thing for them. They weren't happy with Soviet rule and they were coming out and celebrating in the streets. And, you know, all of the anti-Semitism was kind of bubbling up because they were very prejudiced against the Jews. There's a really important moment. When the Russians are retreating, just after Operation Barbarossa,

the Russians are retreating. And because his dad had sort of been the manager of this depot for the Russians, they actually offered, look, why don't you retreat with us? We'll take your family. But we can only take your family. You can only take two suitcases on the truck.

And Max's dad said, well, let's go. And Max's mom said, no, I don't want to leave my family. And we don't know what's coming. You know, I don't think the Germans can't be that much worse than the Russian rule, right? And so Max remembers his mum and dad having a big argument about it. And they decided to stay. So they didn't leave with the Russians. And then within about a month of the Germans occupying his town of Buczec, some of the sort of prominent men of the town are rounded up, Jewish men. And one of them is his dad. And he's taken out into a sort of plaza and they never see him again.

When the Germans reoccupied the city, maybe a week, maybe 10 days, they made an announcement. Every single Jew from the age of 18 to 40, he should go and register into the city hall and the police station for labor. Every Jewish man, not women, went and registered their name to work, willingly, gladly to work for the Germans. But it was not a registration for work, really. It was a registration for segregation. They segregated the Jewish population. And two, they took the labor force of Butchers and they put them in the right side. They took the doctors, the lawyers, the members of the government, every higher position was eliminated the first two weeks of their occupation. They lured them on the trucks and they sent them to Feather Hill and they shot them. And I never saw my father again. Rebecca told me that your mother tried to use her jewels or money to try and... She thought your father might be alive. She tried to get him back and she was forced to give away her money,

her jewels. Is that what happened? was forced to give away her money, her jewels? Is that what happened? Well, what happened really was people were nervous. They didn't know what happened to them because nobody knew that they were dead already. So they came down and said, the police came down and said, it is possible for them to write to you soon. It was possible to get in touch with them. They will write to you back. But this was not true. This was a lie. And he says, because they need money. But to be able to get in touch with them, we have to pay money to be able to get to them, to give them the possibilities to write to you. So my mother, how much is it?

Whatever money, I have no idea the quantity or the amount, but I remember my mother selling jewelry and giving to somebody the money to help them to be able to get in contact with the rest of the families. But they took the money. There were no answers anymore. This was a one-shot. This all happened within a month. They were killed.

Money was taken away from them. And all of a sudden, the population became poor, hungry, and nothing could help anything. Max remembers his mother going to the neighbors, trying to get food for her and the kids. There was a sort of Jewish quarter, not quite a ghetto for a while, where they all had to go and live. And for a certain amount of time, they were better protected than a lot of cities in that part of the world. But that didn't last very long. And so Max remembers his mum going to a former neighbour and trying to ask her, you know, can I sell you some of our furniture to buy some food from you? And this is like a neighbour who used to, you know, live next door to them.

And the neighbour said, well, no, because you can't even sell me any of that stuff because that all belongs to the state at this point. That's not yours. And then the neighbour would just go and loot the house. So Max has horrible memories of neighbours turning on him and his family as soon as the Germans came in. After this announcement about my father, they announced that the city has to be Juden-free. All the Jews have to live in a ghetto. You could only take two bags with you to the ghetto. So my mother didn't know what to do.

She loaded up two bags and she went to the neighbor. And I played with her son. They were my friends. They were beautiful people. I had never any problems with them. beautiful people. I had never any problems with them. But in those couple of weeks or the months, they were converted to hate the Jew to such an extent that when my mother went and said, you know, we have to move to a ghetto. Would you like to have some furniture and change it? Would you like to have anything Because we're going to leave, he says, for food, for bread,

something to give us, to sustain us. And she replied, you have no right to sell anything. Anything that you own belongs to the government, and you have to leave it, and I don't have to give you anything. I could take whatever I want and she didn't give me a slice of bread. This is the hatred they created within months and we moved to the ghetto with two bags, with no food, with no money and nothing to own and nothing to sustain life. So then we'll fast forward to 1943. They're basically at this point trying to clear the

whole town of Jews, right? And so Max and his mom and his sister and his grandfather are all living in this very small room and Max has built a bunker in the wall behind a sort of dresser that he pulls in front of the bunker he crawls in through the doors of the dresser and they all hide whenever there are clearances of the Jewish quarter they all hide because you know they come through every so often to clear them out they're called actians they're called actions where they come through and the gestapo and ukrainian police come through and start clearing them out and they managed to survive quite a few clearances max remembers hearing some people above him everyone had hiding places and max remembers hearing a baby crying and that gave away a family above them so they were taken out and never seen again

and max and his sister and his mother and his grandfather, you know, managed to survive in their hiding places every time there are these actions for quite a while. And then one day these looters come through and they push the dresser aside to look for valuables and that's where they find the hiding place. And then they inform the Gestapo and the Gestapo come and they clear them out.

They were right on the ghetto every week. They took out 100 people, 150 people to the ghetto, load them on the truck under the assumption of labor, and they never returned home. And those raids were constantly done by the Ukrainian police with the help of the Germans and the trucks to take away the Jews. And at one of those raids, they came into my building, they raided the building, and they found the bunker that most of the people from the building were hiding. This was a very big commotion. The Ukrainian population came in to rob those buildings. And when they came into our room, and they wanted to remove a piece of furniture from the wall, which was a bookshelf, and they tried to remove it, and I nailed it. They ripped it away from

the wall, and they found the hole that I was hiding with my mother, grandfather, sister. They ran away, and they called the police into the building back. The police, Ukrainian police, came in. They took us out from the bunker and they tried to bring us down the steps. I remember when they were going down the steps, my grandfather didn't see well and he stumbled and he fell down the steps. I remember a policeman going down the steps towards him. He couldn't get up from the floor fast enough. He took the rifle and he shot him in the head. They took us downstairs. They gathered together a group of maybe 300 people and they brought us into jail. What happened in the rest of the city, I have no idea. So Max is in a prison with his mom. His grandfather gets shot right in front of him

as they're clearing them out. And that's the last time he saw his grandfather. His mom and his sister and him are in a sort of holding cell and they don't know where they're going to be going. They're taken out and they start getting loaded onto trucks. But Max's mum knows what's happening. Somehow she understands. And she's got his little sister who's five years younger than him. Max is at this point 12 years old. He remembers a circle of trucks and dogs and guards.

Ukrainian police are sort of handling this situation. And he remembers his mum turning to him and saying, you cannot get on this truck with us. And he thought they were going somewhere else. So he said, well, why are you taking my sister? Why are you taking Zonya and not me? And his mum says, you cannot get on the truck. You have to leave. You have to walk out of this. You have to just walk out of here. I mean, I think this is the thing that I found so difficult researching these Holocaust stories, is it was often the mothers who had to send their kids away. They had to tell their kids to walk or run away from situations where they knew it was possibly as likely

that they were going to see their kids being shot trying to walk away. But they knew that getting on those trucks was the end as well. I mean, it's just horrific when you really have to think about it. My mother says to me, you know, I don't know if we're going to live or die, but I want you to know something. You have to try to save yourself. You have no choice. Nobody from our family is alive. You're the only one alive. I don't know what's going to happen to me, but I have a bundle here of documents and pictures of your family. I want you to keep it. I think you will need them one day. I say, what do you mean you want to give me some pictures? I don't know what

am I going to do with it. You keep them, hide them, keep them. The police came out and started to yell out, rouse, yelling, making noises. It was a commotion where people were falling down on each other. My mother comes over to me. She says, you have to run away. I said, where am I going to run, mother? What do you mean run away? You're my mother. I never forget those words. You're my mother. Why don't you want me to go with you? You can't go with me. I want you to live. I don't think she even listened what I was begging her. She just pushed me away, and I fell. And the commotion was so big that they were pushing the people, and they already bypassed me. And my mother was already close to the trucks.

I opened my eyes eyes and I said, what does she want me to do? Where should I go? And honestly, till today, I can't understand. I got up and I walked towards the bridge. I don't see anybody. I just walk and I wind up on the bridge, maybe 200 or 300 feet away from the trucks that they loaded.

Nobody sees me. Nobody stops me. I'm walking on the bridge, and towards me is walking a German officer. He doesn't see me, and maybe he does. I have no idea. I bypass him. And from curiosity, just curiosity, I turn around to see where he is going or what, for what reason, I have no idea. And he turns around, and the same moment, our eyes meet.

And he says to me, stop. I stop. I stop. Come here. I go to him. Where are you coming from? I say, I'm coming from the city hall. Are you a Jew? He says, no.

What were you doing in the city hall? I said, my father works in the city hall, and I come in for lunch with him. I came from school. He takes out his revolver, his gun, cocks it, points it in my head, and he said, tell me the truth, he says. Are you a Jew? I says, no. He turns around, puts back his gun and his halter, and lets me go. And the end of the bridge, I walk to the end of the bridge,

and my auntie is standing there and watching me. I turn around to see if my mother at least saw me going on the truck. I saw the trucks leaving the compound. I have no idea if she saw me free. I hope she saw me. I hope she went to death knowing that her son listened to her and survived. He talks about his survival being a series of little miracles, right? And that was one of them. And he never saw his mother or his sister again.

He, for a long time after that, thought maybe he'd see them at the end of the war. He always imagined them somewhere better than he was, you know, and he was quite upset that his mom, he felt abandoned by his mum, which is just devastating. Do we know where they went now? Yeah, we do know where his mum and his sister went. So when I was researching this story with a sort of team of people for a documentary I made, we teamed up with this organisation called Yahad in Unum, who are, they basically go around Eastern Europe documenting forensically

the Holocaust. And so they call it the Holocaust by bullets in Eastern Europe, right? Because people were generally shot there rather than gassed. There wasn't so much concentration camps in particularly that part of Eastern Europe. It was more, you know, people being shot on the edge of mass graves and thrown into graves. So what this amazing organization you had in Unum do is they have these teams of researchers who go out to all these different places in Ukraine, parts of Poland, and they go and interview all of the eyewitnesses, the locals who were around at the time, the non-Jews who would remember things. I went to Ukraine with this organization in 2019 and we went to these tiny villages and found these incredibly old at this point,

people who remember being children at the time and seeing all of the Jews being rounded up. There was a woman who must've been in her late 90s and she remembers she was taking a cow out to pasture. She was a little girl and she was leading her cow down the road and she just saw hundreds of Jews marching up to this place called Fedor Hill.

And she remembers seeing women and children being shot on the edge of these trenches and thrown in. So we think that's where Max's mum and sister ended up. So actually, they didn't have a long journey through the camp system. They were just killed almost immediately. They would have been killed within hours of getting on that truck

because the truck would have taken them up the hill. Then they would have walked to these pits, basically. And so little Max is by himself? Little Max is by himself. But little Max had an aunt and an uncle who ran a chocolate factory. And they were allowed to stay running their chocolate factory because the Germans enjoyed eating their chocolates. So they were still, Max knew his aunt was still in town.

She was probably one of the last Jews still allowed to be in her, where she was living and working, but she wasn't going to last much longer. Anyway, he ran to her factory and she said, I knew this day might come. Your mom knew this day might come. I found somewhere for you to hide. She told him she was going to be hiding in town. She and her husband were about to go into hiding because they knew that basically they were at this point eliminating all the Jews in the town. And so she said, we've found a hiding place in town. They won't take children. So Max feels a second abandonment by a family member because his aunt's just saying they won't take children in this hiding place. So I found somewhere out of town for you. And is that paid? Is that just somebody who's just

incredibly brave and kind? Or is this a kind of transactional thing? Would money be exchanged? It's transactional. So the deal was that the aunt had found a Polish peasant farmer out in the surrounding village who had agreed to shelter Max. And every week, he'd come into town and go to the restaurant where her hiding place was and get money from her. So she was paying for him to keep Max, this Polish farmer. So Max heads out in the countryside. Yeah, Max gets packed in the back of a wagon with some other Jews going into hiding at a different farm. There was a lot of Jews being sent out to often Polish villages. And Max was sent out to this family of this guy

called Jasko. And so he ends up on this very, he remembers it being a very, very, very sort of basic farm. Like it was a real peasant farm. And he wasn't used to that. He was from this town and he came from a fairly middle-class family. It was quite a shock for him. And he hid in plain sight there.

So this farmer Jasko, his wife Kasia, and I think they had two children, little boys, tiny little boys. And Max was to hide in plain sight. They gave him Polish clothing. They told him that he was basically a relative that had come to live with them. That was going to be the cover story. And how long does he survive there?

Max survives there for quite a few months. I mean, he's living with Jasko. He's helping out on the farm. And he's there for quite a few months. I mean, he's living with Yasko, he's helping out on the farm, and he's there for quite a few months. And he even remembers some of the neighbors actually knowing that he was a Jew. He was kind of Yasko's Jew. And that was okay for a while. And then one day the Ukrainian police arrive. noticed that Yashku has a boy working for him, that Yashku has a helper. Where in the world could Yashku get a helper? He was a poor little farmer without a farm, a guy who had to hire himself out to other farmers to sustain his life for a sack of potato. Somebody figured that I could be

a Jew. They went ahead to the police, and one day there is a knock on the door, and there is a policeman, a Ukrainian police, standing in the doorway. And he said, please come here. He came over. He says, we were told by a neighbor of yours that you are hiding Jews. If you tell us, Yashko, where they are, we will let you go. We will just take away the Jews and nothing will happen you go. We will just take away the Jews, and nothing will happen to you. But Yashku, remember what we're telling. You're not going to tell us, and we will find the Jews, and we will catch them. We will kill the Jews in front of you. We will kill your wife. We will kill your children in front of you for the lie that you're telling.

I'm waiting in the house for Yashka to say yes. And I know this is going to be my last moment of life. My mother came to my mind. What did you want me to save myself? You told me to save myself. All the things went through my head, and I hear Yashko say, I don't have any Jews here. Nobody is hiding in my place. You could look. I was stunned. Yashko risking his life for me? He was an angel. He is not a human being,

because no human being would do that and endanger his family. They look in the whole barn, in the stable, around the barn, every single place on the roof. I remember they were climbing up the attic and I am helping him find me. And while they were looking in the barn and outside, I'm scared. So I take the bundle of pictures and papers

that I had on me and go to the oven and shove it in deep down next to the chimney. And I figured they're not going to look inside of the oven. For me, they leave. And Yashko comes in and he says, you know, I'm afraid. I'm afraid that somebody told them, a neighbor, you have to go into the woods. Come back at night. Come back later. I run into the woods. The police is leaving.

I came back later at night when it got dark. I walk into the house. I see the stove lit. I run over to the stove and the papers were all burned. And there was left without a picture of my father, my mother, my sister, anything else, maybe the papers were my ownership to homes, to my home, nothing. Everything was burned. At the end of the day, he comes back to the house and he sees his horror that the fire's been lit

because they're cooking dinner and they didn't know he'd hidden his documents in there. And so all his family photos, Max does not have a single family photo to this day because they all burnt in that stove when he was hiding. It's just awful. So he survived that hunt, but do things change now? Does Jasko decide this is too dangerous?

In Eastern Europe, the punishment for hiding Jews was hanging. You know, your whole family could be hanged. So Jasko is getting pretty worried at this point about you know the threat to his entire family if he keeps sheltering max and so he asks him to go out and sleep in the woods he basically sends him out into the woods and that must have been really hard for yasko because this is a 12 year old boy that you're sending out into the woods by himself and max then spends you know the better part of a year basically out into the woods by himself. And Max then spends, you know, the better part of a year basically living in the woods.

He built a little shelter that he lived in. Jasko had taught him how to tie a snare and try and trap rabbits, and he would forage berries, and he would trap rabbits, and that's basically how he survived. He put me into the woods. He gave me a lighter. He gave me a knife. He gave me a pot. He gave me a knife. He gave me a pot. He gave me his

wife's coat. He gave me some clothing. He took straw with himself. He was nice to me. I could not even dream to find a Christian this nice to me. He took me and we found a little place under a stone. He put in the stone, the straw. Stay here. You could come, he says, into the night if it's cold. You could sleep in this table, but please don't stay in my house. I don't want nobody to see you. You could sneak in. I don't want nobody to see you you could sneak in I will give you some food but don't stay too long only overnight when nobody sees you

and I said okay and I stayed by myself in the woods for a year and a half it was the worst thing in my life You listen to Dan Snow's history this is the story of a remarkable tale of World War II Holocaust survival. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. there were other jewish fugitives of hiding in these woods yeah there were other jews hiding in the woods he didn't come across them that often he did come across some at various points and occasionally he'd sort of live with some of them and then they'd disappear after certain raids. And there were also these

groups of Ukrainian Jew hunters, they called them, who would come into the woods. Just do these sweeps through the woods? Sweeps through the woods and they would be paid by the police if they take Jews in. And I read that they were paid in vodka or sugar to bring in Jews from the woods. So he's living pretty much by himself for months and months and months. Yeah, he's by himself for months and months and months.

And he remembers the acute loneliness being the worst part of it all. The starvation, yes, the hunger, absolutely. But he said the loneliness is the worst. A child by himself, hungry, dark, no lights. And I'm lying there. I used to dream. My whole life changed into a dream.

The only thing I had is dreaming and painting and arguing with God. That's all what I had. The only person I could talk loud, really loud and yell was God. I said, look what you do to me. Look at the way I look. I don't even look human, I used to say. I eat like an animal from the river. I drink water with my dirty hands. I have no shoes, clothing. It's cold. It's winter. My feet are wrapped in rags with strings attached. Why did you create me as a Jew? What was the purpose? Why does my mother

want me to live? Why didn't she take to me and end it? Why do I have to see all this horror and live like an animal? You're supposed to be the helper of the world. What are you helping? You're giving me nothing." All of a sudden, I'm lying in my hole, and it gets so quiet in the woods. Unbelievable, like quiet, like it would be night. And I hear somebody walking and I look out for my little bunker and I see a little boy walking. That God heard me? That I yelled at him?

That God listened to me? That he sent me somebody to be with me? I think so. I think it was God's will. And what was the little boy's story? Why was he wandering around the woods by himself? So the little boy's name was Yannick. And he told Max that he had been hiding in the woods with his family. And his dad had gone to look for food, never came back. His mom had gone to look for his dad and food, never came back. And then he got hungry and he left his hiding place.

And that's where Max found him wandering around. And he was 10 years old. So you've got a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old now. So you've got a 12 and a 10-year-old. And Max remembers sort of becoming Yannick's father in a way. You know, he really felt very protective of this kid. He was only two years older, but Yannick was much smaller than him and incredibly

scared all the time. Max remembers that and very vulnerable. So Max, at the age of 12, almost 13 at this point, he doesn't know exactly how old he was. He doesn't know when it was. He sort of becomes almost like a little parent figure for this younger boy. And it gives him a purpose. You know, he really feels I need need to protect this kid. And he relies on me. And so he forages for them. He catches rabbits, you know, in his snare. And now he's got someone to be his companion. And of course, the winter is massively cold in that part of the world.

And they build a bunker under a rock, I think. They start digging it and they build it. And they live in the bunker together. Max remembers Jasko had given him a big kind of cast iron pot. And what he would do is he would put embers from fires they'd make outside. He'd put them in the pot and he'd take them into their bunker. So it was like his little heating, his stove. So that's how they sort of kept warm, basically, in their little bunker together. And he remembers them playing games. They would play games. Yannick was an amazing mathematician, apparently. That's one of the things Max remembers about Yannick is

he could add up any numbers in his head. And Max thought that was amazing still to this day. 90 years old still is in awe of Yannick's math skills, this 10-year-old kid. And what happens? So Max and Yannick live together for months. And one night they wake up to horrible sounds of shooting. There's a big massacre going on very close to them. They're not sure what it is. Max wonders if perhaps they're being liberated by the Soviets.

And so in the morning, Max says to Yannick, look, let's go and take a peek. And Yannick says, no, no, I'm too scared. Let's not. You know, he was a very scared kid. Let's not go out. Let's not, come on, just stay in the bunker. And Max says, no, no, we might've been liberated. Let's go and let's go take a look. And he brings Yannick out of the bunker and they start walking down towards a river where the sound had been coming from the night before the shooting. And they come across a horrific massacre of up to 10 people, somewhere between eight and 10 people,

bodies lying on the edge of this river. And they were Jewish people who'd been hiding in the woods? Yeah, they were Jewish people who'd been hiding in their own bunker. They found the bunker where they'd been hiding. And they basically saw the door had been thrown open. And they'd obviously been trying to run away from this team of Jew hunters. And a lot of them had been shot in the back as they were approaching the river. And he could see one body kind of just across the river. And Max thought he saw it move. And he said, Yannick, someone's alive over there. We have to go and help them. This is a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old. And Yannick says, no, no, we can't go in the river. It's too cold. It's too cold. I'm too scared. We need to go back to our bunker. And Max says he knew he had to go and see what

had happened over there. And he thought someone was still alive. So he grabs Yannick's hand and he knew he needed Yannick's help to bring the person back somehow. So he grabs Yannick's hand and together they battle across this river, freezing cold water. And they get to the body and they find that it is the body of a woman. She's been shot in the back. Max realises she's dead and he sees something moving under her overcoat and he pulls back the overcoat and there's a baby alive. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Eight bodies were spread over an area with blood covered, the white snow, the ice are open, lying with the spread hands. It was unbearable to see. Yannick said, let's go away from here.

Let's run away. Let's not even look at it. I said, Yannick, I have no shoes. I have no clothing. Everything is torn to pieces. Let me take off some shoes from the people. At least I'll have a pair of shoes. Look at them. They have clothing. We will be warm, hiding. We have nothing, Jan. Everything is gone. Let's off a coat. I found a blanket. I found some other utensils. And we prepared a bundle to take with us. And he was happy, Jan. And we're getting out from there. And as I'm walking, I look across the river.

And I see a woman lying on the edge, half covered with snow, half on the water, and she moved. I say, Yannick, this person there is moving. She needs maybe help. Let's do something. No, no, no, no, no. We can't do that. First of all, it's frozen.

We have to go into the water. We cannot go in the other side. It's not possible. Please, he said, I'm afraid. I'm cold. But Janneke said, you can't leave her if she is alive. You can't leave her across the water. You can't just abandon her and let her die.

I grab his hand and pull him in the cold water. Our bodies, I remember my body immediately froze like you get a freezing injection for an operation. I just walked in the freezing water to the body. The body is not moving. The body is dead. But in the arms of that woman hiding is a little baby, maybe a year and a half old, crying. She heard a movement.

She started to cry from hunger, from wet, from cold. I have no idea. I could not stop the way she cried. I said, she must be hungry, Yannick. You see what you did? You should have left them. Yannick, we couldn't have left the baby. You have to take her with you. You have to help her. What are you going to help? What are you going to do now with the baby? What do we know about the baby? I'll try. I'll go to Jashko

and see what I could do. The baby's crying and crying and crying. And of course, Max realizes, what have I done? Now we're in danger because there's a crying baby in our bunker. The crying baby story in a lot of the Jews in hiding stories are horrific. You know, Max remembers hearing stories about people smothering their own babies because they were in fear of their group being caught. So Max is well aware of these stories and well aware of the danger of having this baby in his bunker. And so he decides to go and try and find someone who can take the baby. So he leaves Yannick.

Yannick is shivering, freezing, starting to get sick from going in the freezing cold water. And they have this baby in the bunker. So Max realizes he needs to go out and try and find someone to take this baby off their hands because they're in massive danger with the sound of the baby. So Max goes out to Yasco. He goes back to Yasco's farm and he says to Yasco, can you take this baby? And Yasco says, it's too dangerous for me. I can't take a baby. They'll know it's not my baby. I can't just take a baby. So Yasuko says, look, there's a village half a day's walk from here. And I've heard that there are Jews hiding under the village. Maybe you could find one of them to take the baby. So Max walks through the woods to this village,

finds a bunker, goes down into a bunker, finds a very sort of organized bunch of Jews in hiding in these various bunkers under a village. They are actually, at night they come up and protect the village, they're Polish villagers. It's really interesting. So a lot of these villages had kind of organizations where they would have Jews hiding in bunkers under the villages and they'd help them, they'd bring them some food.

And at night the Jews would come up and keep watch for bands of Ukrainians coming to actually attack these Polish villages. Because there was a lot of conflict between the Poles and the Ukrainians. So it's quite interesting some of the way that the Jews helped some of these Polish villages and it was sort of a quid pro quo arrangement. And so these bunkers were quite well built because they were built with the help of these Polish villagers. Amazingly, Max finds the aunt of the baby. He tells these people in this bunker about this massacre he's found on the riverbank. And this woman starts shouting and saying, I know the bunker you're talking about.

That's where my sister was. You're talking about my niece. You've got my niece. And so Max brings this woman back to his bunker. He gives her the baby and he asks her, please, can me and Yannick come and stay in your bunker with you? We're freezing. Yannick's getting sick. We want to be around adults. He was so happy to be around adults. He felt in such good hands. And she said, there's no room for you in our bunker. And I often think of that woman and it's just to be in the position to not be able to take in those kids is just horrific. And she had to live with that for the rest of her life, I'm sure, knowing that she just left these two boys out in the woods. She had to make that decision. I think it's very hard to judge decisions like that, but it's just

living with that must have been horrible. And she goes off and Yannick gets sicker and sicker. I think basically he got hypothermia from going in the river, from saving the baby. And Max goes to Yasco to try and find medicine. And while he's at Yasco's, he leaves Yannick in the bunker. When he comes back to the bunker, he can't find Yannick. Yannick's not in there. He goes outside and starts searching for him. And he finds Yannick frozen in the snow, lying outside the bunker. And he's dead. But of course, Max doesn't quite either accept it or realize it. He remembers trying to wake him up. He remembers trying to warm him up. He brings him into the bunker. He tries to warm him up. And Yannick's not moving. Yannick's not moving. His hands are stiff. And it takes Max a while to realise that he's actually dead.

And he goes back to Yasko and he tells Yasko and Yasko comes out and together they basically seal up the bunker like a tomb. And that's where Yannick is to this day. After they seal the tomb, does he continue living in the woods then? No, so after they seal the tomb, Yasko says, look, the Soviets are close. I think you can come back and stay in my barn now. I think it must have just been so devastating for Jasko to have this little kid who's just

lost his only friend in years, been living in the woods by himself. And Jasko just said, you need to come with me. At this point, you come and live in my barn. The Soviets are close. The Germans are retreating. And within probably weeks, the Soviets arrived on the outskirts of town and Jasko rode Max into town. And Max remembers sitting, not hiding in the hay behind Jasko in the wagon, but sitting up on the bench, the front bench of the wagon. And he remembers feeling so free because he could just sit out there and be, you know, Max. And they drove into town and Max ends up actually retreating with the Soviets

because there's actually another German, push the Germans, retake the town. Jasko says to him, you can come back, come back and stay with me if you want, or you can retreat with the Russians. And Max decided to retreat with the Russians. And that was probably a brilliant decision because we know from records that Jasko was then actually displaced into German-occupied Poland. So his family would have been taken and they were taken off to work further west. So Max would have been discovered. And did Max ever see Jasko ever again?

Max never saw Jasko ever again. He completely attributes his survival to Jasko and again? Max never saw Jasko ever again. He completely attributes his survival to Jasko and his family and the heroism that they demonstrated by sheltering him and feeding him and helping him. He would love to find them. His name was Jasko Rudnicki and he was Polish and lived in the very sort of eastern part of Poland at that time, now western Ukraine, and lived in the very sort of eastern part of Poland at that time, now western Ukraine, and had two sons, Max remembers. And Max has tried to look for him, because he wants him to be declared righteous among the nations, which is basically, you know, non-Jews who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust. But the thing about that is you need two eyewitnesses to have someone

proclaim righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. And Max is the only witness. So if Max can find a descendant of Yasco who remembers this family story being passed down that his great-grandfather, grandfather, father sheltered a Jewish boy, then Max's testimony can line up and there could be two witnesses to oral histories of this righteous among the nations man who helped save Max. That would be amazing. And Max would love that. But not yet. It hasn't happened so far. So he ends up going to Canada as an orphan. He thrives in Canada. Yeah. So he actually has this really incredible story of retreating with

the Soviets and then this kind of crazy jaunt through Soviet occupied Europe after the war. And he was selling vodka on the black market. He was like a 14, 15 year old kid who's selling stuff on the black market. He's in Romania, he goes into Hungary, and then he gets into Austria. He goes into the Western occupied zone Zone and he then goes into a displaced persons camp. And he ends up in 1948 being sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress. They sponsored, I think, a thousand orphans from Europe. He was a little bit older than they wanted. Families kind of wanted like four to seven year olds. At this point, he was about 15, but he did end up being accepted and he went off to Montreal, Canada Canada and that's where he spent the

rest of his life. So he became a businessman, he did lots of different things but the one thing that he'd always wanted to do and I think a lot of this was formulating in his mind as he was living in the woods and going through all of this trauma, he became an abstract expressionist artist and he still paints to this very day, every day he paints. And then you met him 80 years later. And his great ambition was to find out what happened to that baby that he saved in the woods. Yeah, so I met Max when he was 90. And I interviewed him for a documentary. And I remember it was so clear to me in that interview.

I interviewed him for about four hours. And he was so caught up on Yannick's death and the idea that Yannick sacrificed himself for what he didn't know. He didn't know what happened to the baby. He'd handed off this baby and for all he knew, the baby had perished when the Germans came back into the town or whatever, right? That he just didn't know what happened to the baby. And it was completely haunting him. The death of Yannick haunted him so much. You could tell when I talked to him about it, he goes back to the sort of 12 year old boy, right? Who lost his best friend and his only companion. And so I knew that if we could maybe find that baby, who would no longer be a baby,

obviously, if we could find out what had happened to that baby and if she had survived, then maybe in some way that would help him bring some kind of closure about Yannick's death, or at least some kind of resolution to him. And so I had a team of researchers, incredible researchers all over the place, Poland, Israel. And I remember I had organized to go to Israel with Max to film with him for the documentary. And weeks went by with the researchers working away, working away, working away. And I get a call the night before I'm flying to Israel from my producer. And he says, Rebecca, they found the baby. And I literally,

to this day, I actually get very emotional talking about it because I couldn't believe it. And I knew how big this was going to be for Max. I actually had to hang up the phone. He was like, Rebecca, are you there? I'm going to call you back. I can't. And it was so extraordinary. You kind of, you know, Dan, you work in documentaries and you always have these great goals for documentaries. Oh, let's do some research and see if we can do this. Let's see if we can answer this question. Let's see if we can answer this question. You often don't actually manage to answer the questions. And the process itself is really wonderful and illuminating, just trying to answer the questions. And the process itself is really wonderful and illuminating, just trying to answer the questions.

And that's what I thought we were going to be doing with this film. And we found the baby. And we took Max to Haifa, where this baby was, with her whole family gathered. She wasn't a baby, obviously. She was in her mid-80s. And her family were there. Her son was there.

Her granddaughters were there. And Max met her. She unfortunately has Alzheimer's and she's really had it for a long time. So she couldn't tell him her own story, but her family could. And they had this incredibly tragic story about her mother crossing the river with her and being shot. And she actually had an older sister who survived and saw, looked back and saw her mother being shot with her sister in her arms. So it's all corroborated. Corroborated.

I mean, it was extraordinary. My researcher did a chart that all of the elements that it's the same in both the stories and all the art, and there was nothing that wasn't. It was all the elements were the same. The stories matched up exactly.

But this family had no idea because the aunt had never told her how she had been rescued. So the aunt brought up this girl, the aunt that Max had handed her to, and the aunt never told her exactly how she'd gotten out of the river. And I suspect going back to that moment where the aunt had to leave these two boys in their bunker, she probably didn't want to remember the real story. And, you know, I'm sure there's a,000 stories like that of these survivors. And so when Max met this lady in Haifa, she hadn't spoken for a very long time because she was really debilitated with Alzheimer's. And her family sort

of said to Max, she can't speak, she can't speak, but she can listen, she can hear you. And he started speaking to her in Yiddish, which I don't think she'd heard for many, many, many years. And she responded and said something back to him. And the whole family were in tears. I mean, they just couldn't believe that she had just said something. She basically said to him, he said to her, do you remember I went in the river? Do you remember the two boys who came into the river and pulled you out of the arms of your mother? And she said, it'll be okay. It'll be okay. That's what she said to Max and she hadn't spoken for 10 years. And Max says, you know, at the end of the documentary,

he says, Yannick was a hero. I see that now. Yannick was a hero. He died. He was a hero. And she's had children and they're going to have children and their children will have children.

The continuation of life forever. And to him, that was everything. You know, Dan, I never in my entire life, and I'm talking about entire life, 70 years being in Canada, ever dreamt that this baby survived. I never even imagined the trees alive. When they did the research of cheating Hitler and they found the baby alive, I didn't believe it's possible, but it is possible. It shows you. It was the sight I remember sitting and talking about me and the researcher, Rebecca, sitting on the other side of the table. He said, we have something to tell you.

And that was in Israel. I guess, I guess they already knew that she's alive. But I didn't know. So she says, you know, we found the baby. I said, what? I could not understand. I could not, which baby, what baby? I tried to wipe out what the baby you say. I said, my God. I started to cry. You mean she is alive? Yes. She is not only alive, she said, my God. I started to cry. You mean she is alive? Yes. She is not only alive, she said.

She has grandchildren. She got married. You know, I was guilty of Yannick's death. Somehow, Yannick came back to my life. The baby came back. The baby is alive. I did not really kill the baby. I did not kill Janek.

Janek is a hero. He saved a baby with me. Yes, Janek died because maybe I pulled him in. But look what we did, me and Janek. We saved humanity. We saved a life with continuation. We saved… She has children. She has a family. She has grandchildren. You know what that means? That Janik is a hero. And I figured I was very happy. But I was still guilty of the death of Yannick,

but I was very happy. This was the happiest day in my life. And so you made the documentary, and it was a wonderful documentary. And then, incredibly, you decided to write a screenplay, and you got support from places it's really hard to make a movie but you did a lot of hard work and you made a whole movie yeah a whole proper grown-up flipping movie yeah with like actors and famous people in it yeah Richard

Armitage plays the wonderful Polish farmer Jasko Thorin Oakenshield was in your movie yeah and Max loves it yeah Max I mean this is the thing so that story you know I made the documentary and that story I just couldn't leave it or it couldn't leave me it had me by the jugular so I knew it had to be a movie like I could just see the movie play out I could see it when I closed my eyes and so I with Max's permission adapted his memoir he's got a memoir called the boy in the woods which is a wonderful book, by the way. And it tells a lot more than I'm telling here. And I adapted his memoir, The Boy in the Woods, into a screenplay.

And then we got it financed through Canadian government funding and some Holocaust organization funding. And shot it in Canada. The woods in Canada look like the woods of Poland. And we had this incredible actor, a young guy called Jet Klein, who plays Max, 12 years old, the actor. And he just carries this entire film. And he does such a beautiful job of portraying Max. And then another lovely little boy who plays Janek. And so a lot of the film centres on that relationship, these two boys. And then I'm really struck by the fact that Max,

who doesn't have any pictures of his sister or his mum, he's now got photographs of the actors who played them up in his house. Yeah, yeah. He lost all his photos in that fire at Yasco's house. And I had a lovely photo that we actually use in the film, the real Max looks at this photo, of the actress who plays his mother and the actress who plays his little sister.

And I gave it to Max because he said, can I have one of them? And he now has it framed in his house in place of the real photos that burnt in 1943. He now has the people who play them in his film. For me, making this film, obviously, I want it to get out there and do well and audiences to see it. But to know that Max loves the film, he saw it, and I was incredibly nervous for Max to watch it. And he absolutely loves it. And, you know, I think the mission of so many Holocaust survivors

who are willing to talk about their experience is to have their voices and their stories told, to have them heard. They go out to schools and they talk and they do television documentaries and they do as much as they can. They write memoirs because they need their story to be told. But they also need the story of everyone around them who didn't survive to be told. And Max has carried the story of his mother, his sister, his father, his 60 family members who didn't survive. And Yannick, this little boy who he lived with in the woods and who died in his bunker.

He's carried those stories with him for 90 years on his shoulders. And he's needed to sort of carry those stories and tell those stories because they cannot, they no longer have voices. And so for him to know that he's got the memoir, he's got the documentary, and now he's got a movie and it's going out to bigger audiences is huge for him. Bex, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. People can, if they're listening around the world, there's a different place they might

be able to see this movie, but how should they look out for it? So the film has played a whole bunch of film festivals and Max has actually been at some of them, which has been amazing in the audience. And it's going to be available on all sorts of video on demand platforms like iTunes, Amazon, you can rent it on Amazon and the Google Store and stuff like that starting in June. The boy in the woods. Go and watch it, folks. Well done. Thanks, Dan. you