It is a story so remarkable that many struggled to believe it.

A mother tells her six-year-old son that soldiers are on the way to their house to kill them in the morning, and the family will die together. But the little boy does not want to die. Under the cover of night, he escapes the house and hides in the forest, where he watches as the troops round up the inhabitants. From his hiding place among the snow-covered trees, Alex Kurzem – a name he did not go by then – watches as his entire family is massacred.

The boy survives in the Belarus forest, enduring sub-zero temperatures for an unknown number of days, maybe weeks. He forages for food among the strewn abandoned corpses. At night, he ties himself to the high boughs of trees to protect himself from wolves.

Kurzem’s story, which becomes even more extraordinary as it progresses, first became public in the 1990s, was published as a bestselling book in 2007, then accused of being a Holocaust hoax in 2012. The former TV repair man, by then retired and eking out a life on the poverty line in a Melbourne suburb, stood by his story for decades.

Now a new documentary, debuting on SBS on 8 February, delves into the story of how a little Jewish boy could have possibly become “Hitler’s Jewish soldier”.

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