‘Boy in the Woods’ a story of Holocaust survival, says its real-life inspiration

Maxwell Smart was just 11 years old when he lost his family in the Holocaust. Maxwell Smart was just 11 years old when he lost his family in the Holocaust. In 1941, German forces were loading his mother and little sister into a truck after occupying the Polish city of Buchach, now part of Ukraine, when his mother urged him to run into a nearby forest. The Jewish-born Smart lived alone for months, subsisting on wild mushrooms while evading the occasional German soldier who patrolled the woods. Eventually, Smart met another boy in hiding, Yanek, and they built a bunker...