‘I became like a sort of animal’

Like Rose’s mother, she had told Maxwell to run from the trucks that had previously taken his father away, so he did, crossing a bridge and never seeing his mother or sister again.

For months he lived alone, sleeping in crude bunkers cut into the earth, eating mushrooms off old trees where he could find them and grass when he could not, and hiding from the mercenary gangs of Ukrainians patrolling the woods on behalf of the Nazis.

“I became like a sort of animal, a human animal,” he says in the documentary.

Finding a companion in Yanek gave him a sort of hope, and a way forward through despair. “He was my life,” Smart said. “He was my person that I needed.”

They had lived together for perhaps six months in the woods when they heard the gunshots and commotion of a mass execution happening nearby. Emerging later from their bunker, they found seven dead bodies. Smart recalled seeing movement from the other side of a river. There was another body.

There they found a woman who had been shot in the back, and still wriggling in her arms was a baby girl, uninjured and warm.

They took the child to their bunker, but knew they could not care for it. A Christian farmer who had been secretly helping them said he could not take a baby, but told them there was another group of Jews in hiding several kilometres away through the woods. So leaving the baby with Yanek, Maxwell ran for it.

By some astonishing fortune, the group he met included the baby’s aunt, who reclaimed the child. They returned to their own hiding place, telling Maxwell they would return for him, but never did. Yanek, meanwhile, had started shivering with an infection he could not kick.

Smart’s guilt enters the story at this moment, because although he convinced the Christian farmer to go find some medicine, Smart left Yanek in their bunker as he accepted a few days shelter at the farm. By the time he returned to the bunker with a package of food, it was empty. Yanek was dead on the ground a few metres away.

With just the details of Smart’s story, an Israeli Holocaust researcher, Natasza Niedzielska, found the memoirs of a woman whose story matched up. This woman had written a book of her time hiding in the woods near a riverbank outside Buchach. It recalled her escaping across a river from the posse that killed her mother, who stayed in the river with her baby sister in her arms.

Presented on camera with the news that the baby girl is alive, Smart flushed red as tears came.

Soon after, in Haifa, he reunited with Tova Barkai, the baby girl, who is now elderly and non-communicative because of a disability, but has grown children of her own.

Looking her in the eye, and holding her hand, Smart said: “I feel better, and I don’t feel as guilty. It’s true. Yanek died. He’s a hero. He saved you and you have children.”