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The title of Cheating Hitler, a new documentary about three Holocaust survivors and their stories of reunion and reckoning with people who played a role in their survival, comes from a comment by Rose Lipszyc, 90, who lives in Toronto and is active in Holocaust education.
Years ago in Poland, her mother ordered Rose to run from a Nazi roundup of Jews, after which Rose survived the war as a labourer in Germany posing as Polish Catholic. In the film, Rose says she imagines this brought some comfort in her mother’s final moments in a gas chamber at Sobibor extermination camp, to know that she “cheated Hitler of a child.”
Maxwell Smart, 89, a Montreal businessman and painter, also cheated Hitler of a child.
But while Lipszyc has always known she herself is living proof that her mother’s life-saving gamble was a success, Smart has always been burdened with uncertainty.
All he knew for sure until the filming of this documentary was that his effort to save a baby girl from certain death cost the life of his dearest friend, Yanek, for which he suffered a lifelong guilt.
“I have no idea what happened to the baby,” he says in the film’s opening sequence. “It would be nice to know what happened.”
Maxwell Smart and Yanek Arenberg were both young Jewish boys living feral in the woods around Buchach in western Ukraine, site of some of the war’s most horrific atrocities, with Jews buried in mass graves. One scene in the documentary shows the crew finding several bullets on the forest floor near Fedor Hill, a notorious execution site.
Maxwell was a little older than Yanek. Aged 11, Maxwell was a mature boy with a self-sufficiency instilled by his mother.