The boy who hid from Nazis in the woods, part 2

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Maxwell Smart survived the Holocaust by living in a makeshift bunker on the forest floor.

Maxwell Smart was just 11 years old in 1941 when the Nazis took over his town in eastern Poland. One by one his Jewish family were disappeared or killed, but his mother implored him to run for his life just as she and his sister were being loaded onto a German truck. Using his extraordinary ingenuity he managed to survive in remote woodland for the rest of the war, mostly alone, sleeping in improvised shelters and foraging for food. He eventually met another orphaned Jewish boy in the woods, Janek, whose friendship would come to have a profound impact on Maxwell’s life.

In this second episode, Maxwell describes how his life changed again after the war was brought to an end and decades later is part of a shocking reunion.

A feature film based on Maxwell’s life has been released, it’s called The Boy in the Woods.

Presenter: Emily Webb Producers: Edgar Maddicott and Rebecca Vincent Editor: Munazza Khan

Get in touch: [email protected] or WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.
0:06.9	It was an extraordinary news story.
0:09.1	The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,
0:13.7	mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.
0:18.0	One of the great mysteries in English criminal history.
0:20.7	We're still looking for Lucan. It's honestly one of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for
0:21.6	Loken. It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime. I'm Alex Fondonzlement. This is
0:27.7	The Lukan Obsession. Listen on BBC Sounds. It is not possible. I don't believe what I hear. My family did come back to me. I started to cry. We were crying on the floor. Those are overwhelming things. I fought for to survive, to rebuild, and to make it back to how it was. I succeeded.
1:02.0	Survival. That was Maxwell Smart's mother's dying wish, that he survived. Maxwell was a child
1:09.4	in the Holocaust, an 11-year-old forced into a terrifying new reality
1:13.4	after Nazis took over his home country, Poland and killed his family. I'm Emily Webb,
1:19.8	bringing you lives less ordinary from the BBC World Service. This is part two of Maxwell's story.
1:26.4	You can go back and listen to part one to hear how he
1:28.7	ended up living alone in the woods trying to evade capture. Decades have passed since that time.
1:35.4	Maxwell now has children, grandchildren, but those haunting days still live with him, and you
1:41.0	might find his testimony upsetting. Maxwell had been sheltered by a farmer called Yasco.
1:46.7	His aunt helped to arrange this before she too disappeared.
1:50.4	But when that became too dangerous, Maxwell moved into the woods.
1:54.4	The loneliness, he felt, was soothed by another orphan Jewish boy, Yannick, who he found
1:59.3	wandering amongst the trees.
2:02.0	The two became inseparable, two boys fighting to survive, evading the patrols that roamed the forest looking for
2:07.8	Jews. Others weren't so lucky. One day Maxwell and Yannick stumbled across a massacre of other Jews
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -196 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.