“Let me look at your face,” says Maxwell Smart, peering into his webcam as we speak over Zoom. “You’re not bad looking.” Well, this interview is going to go well, I quip, as the 93-year-old Smart settles back for another session talking about a year in his life he would surely rather forget. His best-selling book,The Boy In The Woods, has now been adapted for the big screen, allowing even more people to learn about his remarkable story.
Born in Prague in 1930, Smart’s early years were defined by suffering. In 1941, his father was killed within three months of the German forces occupying the part of Poland where his family lived. Shortly afterwards, he, his mother and little sister were being loaded into a truck as soldiers were cleaning out the ghettos when, at his mother’s urging, he fled to a nearby forest. For the next twelve months, the Jewish-born Smart hid there to evade capture by the Nazis.
There, he relied on the kindness of strangers, as well as his own smarts, to survive. Just let that sink in for a second. An 11-year-old boy, alone in the woods. For a whole year. “Well I had help,” he offers. Played in the film by Richard Armitage, the actor best known for his role as Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, a “poor farmer with a heart of gold” hid him when Nazis were on the hunt for Jews in the region.
“He risked his life to save mine,” says Smart. “They came to look for me and they said [to him], ‘We were told by your neighbour that you are hiding Jews. If you would tell us where they are, we will take them away, and nothing will happen to you. But if you won't tell us, and we will find them, we will kill you, your wife, and your children.’ And this farmer...he says to them, ‘I am not hiding any Jews. You could look.’ He risked his life and the life of his family to help me. And this is how I survived.”
Smart, who now lives in Florida, doesn’t hold back as these painful memories start flooding back. “I had to create a world to survive. I was alone. I had no people around me. Nobody was with me. I couldn’t even talk to anybody. I had nobody to talk to. I only had God. And I was yelling at him. And I was arguing with him. ‘Why did you make me a Jew?’ I said to him, ‘Look at me, the way I look. I don’t even look human. I’m an animal. I eat with my hands. I’m hungry. I’m dying. I’m cold. Why did you have to create me?’”
As Smart talks, anger swells in his voice; the passing of eighty-plus years has not dimmed his feelings one iota. “I was talking to Father John Walsh, a friend of mine, a priest. And he said to me, ‘You know, Max, you had a right to fight with God.’” And yet this ire never dented his belief system. “The most important thing that helped me is faith and belief in God,” says Smart. ‘And miracles. If you would know, the stories of mine, they’re only miracles.”
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The film, which stars Jett Klyne as the young Max, comes directed by filmmaker Rebecca Snow, who first met Smart for her 2019 television documentary Cheating Hitler: Surviving The Holocaust. Smart was skeptical at first that Snow would even complete the film, or that anyone would care. “I didn’t believe that my story means anything,” he says. But after he was fetched by limo to a studio and interviewed for two hours, he “started to believe” that Snow was serious.
One thing led to another, with Smart publishing his memoir The Boy In The Woods, and Snow emerging as the perfect person to direct the feature film version. “She [undertook] tremendous research about me,” says Smart. “She knew about me more than I knew. I was a young boy, I didn’t even know anything about me. She found everything out. My life. My family. My mother. My sister. Where I lived. She found the graves of my parents. She found more about me that possibly I ever could find out.”
It almost defies belief, imagining what it must be like for Smart to see this horrifying portion of his life played out on screen. Yet rather than hide from it, he has embraced it, even going on set during production where he met young Jett Klyne. “I think that Jett is a genius. He portrayed me so well. He did not act as me. He lived as me,” says Smart, who recounts one particularly emotional scene that left the young performer overwhelmed.
“He started to cry, not as an actor. When he finished the scene, he ran out to the place where I was sitting and watching, and ran into my arms. And he cried. And I cried too. He was so emotionally involved, that I don’t even know…he was me. He was me. Really portraying my feelings. He was portraying my life. I think the whole set cried with me together. It was so emotional.”
These must’ve been the first of many tears shed for Smart’s story. Whilst the film toured the festival circuit, the movies theatres have been packed, “And the people are all crying. I don’t know their feelings. But I know how they look to me. They’re involved. They feel with me.” Young viewers in particular are moved by his story, he says. “What is it in my film that makes them so? I think because I was so young. I was a baby really. And I suffered so much.”
Most of all, he was in pain because of the loss of his friend Yanek, played in the film by David Kohlsmith. “The whole movie was based on my guilt of the death of my best friend Yanek,” Smart says. Yanek was another boy hiding in the woods. They befriended each other and even saved the life of a baby girl, but Yanek died, becoming ill after wading into cold water to rescue the child. Smart blames himself, for urging Yanek to brave the freezing conditions. “The guilt was mine. I killed my best friend. For what? For a person that I don’t even know. I was sorry, really, for helping her. If there would have been a question...my friend Yanek to live or the baby…I would have chosen Yanek.”
More than anything, I want to know how Smart felt when he first saw the film. At this point, he unleashes a long, deeply personal answer, one that practically brings me to tears. “It brings me back to my youth,” he says. “It brings me back to the place where I was hiding and bringing me back to my mother when I talk about her. I see her. It brings me back to my past life, which was horrible. To go back to my past is very emotional. It is so emotional. I am 93-years-old. I didn’t want to talk about my past for 80 years. I didn’t want to remember.”
It was only when Snow interviewed him for Cheating Hitler that Smart opened up. “Something clicked in me. Something wanted in me to expose and tell my story to people. It should be told. People should know how I suffer and what hatred and anti-Semitism [there is], and the feeling today in the world to be a Jew. And this is what I liked about it. I said, ‘No matter how much it hurts me, no matter how much I suffer, you have to tell the story. You have to register the story, you have to write a book.’”
More than that, Smart resolved to make it his duty to go to schools and teach children about his past. “This story cannot and should never be forgotten. This story should be like a Bible that we keep for thousands of years, what happened. One and a half million children including my little sister, five years old...she had no idea even if she was a Jew, but she was nevertheless killed as one. This I figured should never happen. And it’s happening again.”
Inevitably, talk turns to the current political situation in Israel and Gaza and the growing rise in anti-Semitism once more. “This is the second time in my life...I never expected the second time to see a disaster. What’s happening now. This disaster...it cannot win. It’s not supposed to win. It should not win. The world should be with the Jews, but they are against it. This is called anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism existed for thousands of years. And no matter how much you try, and how much you want to, you cannot get it out of the system. You can’t. Nothing helps. Nothing.”
When Smart stops talking, almost exhausted from this emotional outpouring, there is silence for a second. It’s remarkable to think that he still has the energy, at 93, to keep reminding us of his story. Like he says, one that should never be forgotten. Our time is up. “You can call me again,” he smiles. “You don't have to go on Zoom.”
The Boy In The Woods is available on digital platforms from 27 May.
