Photo: The Canadian Press
Maxwell Smart, a 94 year-old Holocaust survivor, is shown in an undated handout photo alongside
A teen actor from Penticton who is known for his roles in Marvel’s Doctor Strange and WandaVision will once again be on the big screen.
Jett Klyne stars in the dramatic re-telling of a true-life survival story of a Jewish boy hiding and being hunted in the forests of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
Klyne has been the face of Gerber Baby Food, Fisher Price, Huggies and more. By the age of four, he made his way into the film and television industry.
At age 11, he was brought into the Marvel Universe and quickly grew in fame.
Now 15, Klyne stepped up to play Maxwell Smart, who was just 11 years old when he lost his family in the Holocaust.
Smart’s story takes place in 1941, when German forces were loading his mother and little sister into a truck after occupying the Polish city of Buchach, now part of Ukraine.
He said that his mother urged him to run into a nearby forest, where he lived alone for months, subsisting on wild mushrooms while evading the occasional German soldier who patrolled the woods.
The Jewish-born Smart eventually met another boy in hiding, Yanek.
In order to survive the winter, they built a bunker in the ground. During that time, the boys discovered a baby after a massacre of Jews had occurred in a nearby town.
Smart said the baby was still alive in her dead mother’s arms, and the two crossed a freezing river to rescue her.
Now over eight decades later, the 94-year-old Smart lives in Montreal, keeping the tragedy of the early years of his life secret for most of it.
That changed once Smart finally wrote about his experience after his wife convinced him to write it down, publishing his memoir, “The Boy in the Woods,” in 2018.
Smart first share his story on film as part of director Rebecca Snow’s 2019 documentary “Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust.”
Following that, the Toronto writer-director convinced him his story should be made into a dramatic film.
She had told him it offered important lessons about the impact of war, and to help them create the dramatized feature film, “The Boy in the Woods.”
“She was right; my story should be told to the world. I should show the horror and the misery that I went through. I didn’t go through a real Holocaust story. I have a survival story,” Smart told the Canadian Press.
“I wanted to show what grown-ups, people with brains who run countries, could do to little children. Innocent little children.”
Snow said the film is “a warning from history.”
“We live in very distressing times of racial violence. We see a rise in antisemitism, we see a rise in Islamophobia — lots of different forms of racial violence and so much polarizing rhetoric,” Snow told the Canadian Press.
The film was shot in North Bay, Ont., in 2022.
Klyne said that Smart’s story resonated with him because his great-grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.
“It was really important to me because it’s been a part of my family and I know that even a lot of kids today have no idea what the Holocaust is,” Klyne added.
The emotion of the story impacted the young actor, as Smart said there was a moment on set when he ran into his arms in tears after filming an particularly hard scene.
“He cried and I cried with him,” Smart said.
“This little young boy did not act as Max, he lived and became Max himself. I could not stop him from crying for half an hour. All the performers and all the crew cried together.”
Klyne said the role gave him a deeper emotional understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust.
“The Boy in the Woods” opened Friday in select theatres, with showings this weekend on Saturday and Sunday in Penticton and Kelowna.
– With files from the Canadian Press
Contributed Photon Films and Media
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