He was born into a world that did not understand him.

Hearing impaired since birth, he spent much of his young life searching through the silence and all its uncertainty, through his frustration, for a sense of place, a chance to be heard, for the most basic of human of needs: connection.

In sports, he found a place where the world could not ignore him.

On a court or field or playground he could not be avoided, dismissed.

Between the white lines David Smith found a home.

“For me, sports was who I am,” he said. “For me, especially growing up, it was a way to get on a level playing field. It doesn’t matter how well you speak or how well you can hear, you can go out there and you can kick a ball, shoot a ball, throw, run, hit whatever, you’re going to be accepted by kids. That’s all they care about at that age – can you hang with us?

“For me, sports was a way to show, hey, I can and I can even do it better than you sometimes. So to me that probably was the easiest way to connect with people and be part of a group and community.”

Smith, the former UC Irvine All-American and longtime middle blocker for Team USA, and his wife Kelli are still trying to level playing fields.

David Smith, now 38, is playing the best volleyball of a career that includes three Olympic Games as the U.S. heads into this week’s Volleyball Nations League at Anaheim Convention Center (July 4-9). Smith in May was named the most valuable player in the European Champions League Super Final after leading his club team, Poland’s Zaska Kedzierzyn-Kozle, to a third consecutive Champions League title.

Kelli Smith, meanwhile, with her grassroots fundraising and relentless problem solving has impacted hundreds of Ukrainian refugees who have flooded into Poland since Russia’s invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.

“My wife was especially moved to help those people because she knew as a mom and as a wife it’s tough to go to a country where you don’t speak the language, you don’t know a thing about the people around you, it’s scary,” Smith said. “So she wanted to give them some comfort, she wanted to give them some dignity.”

And a sense of connection.

A sense of belonging.

A SPARK

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars

–”Daddy.” Sylvia Plath

At least once a month Kelli Smith, a cross country and track and field standout at UCI, runs through the thick forest that surrounds the village of Slawiecice near Kedzierzyn-Kozle.

David Smith played professionally in Germany, Spain and France before moving to Poland in 2016 to play for Czarni Radon in 2016 and eventually joining Zaska Kedzierzyn-Kozle in 2019.

“There was a sadness (in Poland) and I remember thinking, is it like this? Is this how Polish people are?” Kelli Smith said, recalling the family’s move to the country. “And instead of trying to judge them, I began reading more history, World War II and also Communism.”

She would also find the answer in the secrets of the woods.

In April 1942, the Nazis built a forced-labor camp for Jews known in the forest around Slawiecice, then part of Germany. When 120 workers contracted typhus they were transferred to Auschwitz where they were murdered. The remaining prisoners were moved to Blechhammer, a subcamp of Auschwitz concentration camp, built in April 1944 on 10 acres.

At least 5,500 prisoners from 15 countries would pass through Blechhammer, part of a network of Auschwitz sub-camps that contained 48,000 prisoners including 2,000 British POWs.

Prisoners at Blechhammer were housed in wooden barracks that had no toilets or running water. Prisoners determined unable to work by the SS were transferred to Auschwitz where they were murdered. Fifteen-hundred prisoners died at Blechammer and were burned in the camp’s crematorium. Healthy prisoners at Auschwitz were moved to Blechhammer.

With the Soviet arms fast approaching, the Nazis abandoned Blechhammer on January 21, 1945, and sent 4,000 prisoners on a 13 day death march to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Prisoners were given half a loaf of bread, a small portion of honey and margarine and half a sausage for the trip. More than 800 died or were murdered on the way to Gross-Rosen where they were put on trains and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Five days after the evacuation of Blechhammer, Nazi soldiers returned to the camp and began shooting some of the 100 or so prisoners who had been left in the camp’s infirmary. Prisoners still capable of walking were ordered to carry the dead to open trenches where they too were shot. The bodies were then covered in straw and gasoline and lit on fire.

On her first run through the forest near Slawiecice, Smith came across remnants of Blechhammer, the camp’s gate and the crematorium, its guard towers.

“Poland is not that far out of some very serious things going on politically,” she said. “So you have to look at everything through that lens and I was actually surprised by the immediate, initial response from Polish people because Polish-Ukrainian relations are fairly complicated historically but Polish people also know what it’s like to be conquered and to have a war in their country and to almost be obliterated as a country and so I think that resonated and people were like, we have to help.”

The Smiths felt a similar calling.

Kelli Smith had previously worked with non-profit groups dealing with child advocacy, literacy and addressing poverty in India.

“The second the invasion happened and the second she had an opportunity to help the people in Ukraine, I just saw the immediate reaction,” David Smith said. “She was just immediately drawn to the pain and the suffering, what she could do to help. She was not, well she never is, content to just sit back and let the world pass her by. She wants to be a voice of change. She wants to be a spark.”

She connected with a local group sending goods to groups working with refugees on the Poland-Ukraine border.

“We were collecting goods to send to the border and so we started buying diapers and had some old cell phones to donate and was posting about that and a couple people from the U.S. said, ‘Oh, can I send you money and you buy stuff on our behalf and send it to the refugees as well?’” Kelli Smith recalled. “And at the time that was kind of the gateway and I mentioned to a couple of people I met here, like, ‘Hey, if something bigger comes up, I think I might be able to raise a little bit of money to do something bigger.’ My thought was maybe I can raise like $10,000 dollars. So I told a few people here that I knew and I think maybe a week into it a friend got back to me and said there’s something we need help with. And it was just kind of interesting that their idea of a bigger thing was so different from my idea of a bigger thing.”

Among the thousands of Ukrainian refugees coming into the area near Kedzierzyn-Kozle were children who had been forced to abandon among other things their education. The Smiths were made aware through friends that also among the refugees was a teacher. The woman, however, could not legally teach in Poland until her teaching credential was translated from Ukrainian to Polish.

“She didn’t have any money,” David Smith said. “She literally just fled across the border with a backpack. That’s all she had. She didn’t have the couple hundred bucks to translate this document so she couldn’t turn around and help a class of Ukrainian children, orphan kids. Have a class so they can have an education. Have a place where they could go be with friends who are in a similar situation as them.”

Kelli Smith recalled, “The big ask was $250 U.S.”

“I could have done that myself but I was like, let me engage my friends and see if someone wants to help and I posted on social media and within 10, 15 minutes we had more than double that amount,” she continued. “So I was like, ‘OK, maybe I really could do something more.’”

Team USA libero Erik Shoji also plays for Zaska Kedzierzyn-Kozle and lives in a downstairs apartment in the home where the Smiths and their two children, Cohen and Amelie, live. Shoji has nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram.

Kelli scheduled a follow-up meeting with the person trying to put together a school for the refugee children and then took to social media, including posting on Shoji’s account during a Zaska match.

“I was thinking let’s raise around $10,000, and within the first 2 ½ days, just saying on social media, ‘Hey, friends, I’m going to raise some money, it’s going to go directly to Ukrainians but I don’t know what that will look like, I don’t know anything right now, I have a meeting on Monday with somebody who’s really hands-on helping people, but if you know me you can trust me, I’m going to give every dollar directly there,’” Smith recalled. “And I just posted my Venmo and my PayPal and said any transaction cost, don’t worry about that, I’ll cover that, it’s all going to go dollar for dollar to Ukrainians. So by the time we had that meeting, we had about $17,000. So it well exceeded our goal, our expectations. So that day we were able to commit to around $10,000 to that contact. He had this big dream of starting some classes for Ukrainian kids in this small village.”

Within a week, Smith’s fundraising had opened a classroom for 18 Ukrainian students. It also covered a clothing allowance and school supplies for each student, and a printer for the classroom.

Before long Smith had also raised enough money to open and furnish a preschool in a cleared-out attic. She raised money for a junior high classroom and purchased a laptop for each student so they could also stay connected with their schools back in Ukraine.

“So from there it just kind of snowballed and I have a good friend here, named Marta, who is like my right hand and people here knew I was trying to help the Ukrainians, so they’d call her and say, ‘Hey, this family just arrived,’ they need clothes or a bike or they need food.” Smith said. “And so it just went like that and we made more and more contacts for people here that we really came to trust and as of right now we’ve raised $88,000. Which is just like crazy, through my Venmo and my PayPal. And it’s just become word of mouth. At the beginning it was just a lot of people that I knew personally, again, through my church community, through my non-profit work, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing tons of people who have had similar passions and feelings toward giving to other people, from there they shared, ‘Hey, I know Kelli personally, I trust her, she’s going to do what she says.’ So that led to kids doing bake sales in Hawaii raising thousands of dollars, people I’ve never met.”

A pair of eighth grade boys in New York sent $1,000 they made as part of a class project selling snacks to their classmates. Mariners Elementary School in Newport Harbor, the school Cohen Smith attends when the family is in the U.S., raised around $5,000.

“It’s gone beyond what I ever thought,” Kelli said. “I never thought it would go on this long. Here we are at the end of June. Not just the war, but my efforts. Last year I usually come home to the U.S. so I thought by April, I would be done and it was like I still have a lot of money so I kept working with my partners, even when I was in the U.S., and it’s like every time I get close to having almost zero, something has popped up and there’s new donations. I still haven’t had to say no to anything.”

For a time, Smith said, “it was basically my full-time job, shopping 8 hours of time. Five hundred pounds of potatoes, 200 pounds of onions. Buy them from a local farmer. So I’m helping the farmer but I’m helping the Ukrainians. Which is interesting. People saw they gave money and then they saw exactly what I was doing. It’s really a concrete thing to see a huge crate of vegetables that I bought and to see that, ‘Oh, my goodness, $250 bought like hundreds of pounds of dry goods.’”

Smith’s efforts have continued even as she has battled the lingering effects of COVID. She has suffered from asthma since high school, a condition made all the more worse by her two bouts of COVID.

“Post COVID, my lungs just aren’t the same and I have to medicate daily just to keep it, weird symptoms at bay, vomit, dizzying,” she said. “Every three to four months having chest pains like having a 10 pound (weight) sitting on my chest at all times. Get dizzy, lightheaded, legs like jello.”

Smith was hospitalized for three days in December.

She refused, however, to be slowed.

Quarantined because of COVID, Smith created a running path around her backyard.

“Thirty laps around the garden is a mile,” she said. “Got up to nine miles. 270 laps. Too much. Erik would take time lapses from his kitchen window, half concrete, half snow, you could see the exact path I ran.”

Her impact can also be seen all over her community.

Recently Smith’s efforts helped fund a renovation and conversion of a building into a community center. Funds have paid for swim passes for families at a local facility, bikes and scooters for children, things to help create a sense of normalcy and connection in a new and often strange place.

“There are some growing pains for some of them,” Kelli said. “Some of them are doing really well and some of them are having growing pains with just different situations so I’m just available to help in those growing pains and financial situations because of this or that. But also I want to help families just have a normal life and be able to do different things. Like, be able to go to the swimming pool and not have to sacrifice their real necessities, to allow their kids to have a normal moment, a normal childhood. So that’s been a big emphasis the whole time: sometimes there are things that are necessities but there are also things, like we all have, preferences and just because you’re a refugee doesn’t mean you don’t get to have a preference.

“Like the old woman who asked, ‘May I buy just one lipstick at the pharmacy on our shopping trip?’ And I said, ‘Of course.’ It’s buying scooters and bikes for kids. They don’t need scooters and bikes, but it lets them be regular kids because they’ve experienced things they shouldn’t have to. So it’s really been about building community relationships. It’s just being ready for whatever comes. Sometimes there are weeks where I don’t hear from anyone and sometimes there are a few things that hit right in a row.

“I just keep waiting for the next thing to see what it is.”

THE SMOJIS

David Smith has never used his hearing impairment as an excuse.

His mother, Nancy, wouldn’t have let him even if he had wanted to.

While getting her teaching credential at Cal State Northridge, Nancy Smith also learned American Sign Language. She went on to teach deaf students in the LAUSD.

“Just happenstance,” David Smith said, shaking his head.

“It just so happened that when I was born she was more equipped than she thought she would be,” Smith continued. “Obviously they didn’t know right away but it was just a miracle how that happened. I think she probably had a little more confidence in how to deal with the situation and advocate for me.

“I think a lot of people with a disability, whether it’s hearing, vision or developmental, it, you’re overwhelmed if you haven’t had any experience with that. But my Mom knew a lot of people who are deaf, even more than I am, but are very capable. So it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, woe is me. Woe is my child.’ It was like I can do this and they can do this too. She’s been my advocate for me, she’s been a rock for me, especially early on in my life.

“Didn’t allow me to go to that default excuse of why I can’t do things. No, you can do it.”

After graduating from Saugus High School, he led UCI to the NCAA title in 2007. Two years later he joined the U.S. national team.

Since the 2010-11 season, club teams featuring Smith as the middle have won 18 league titles or national cups. In four seasons with Zaska Kedzierzyn-Kozle, Smith has won a Polish league title, three Polish Cups, two Polish Super Cups and the last three Champions League crowns.

“David Smith has been one of the most important players for Zaksa throughout their incredible run of success in the CEV Champions League Volley in the last three seasons,” read the Champions League news release announcing Smith as the league’s MVP. “The American middle blocker’s performance in the SuperFinals this past weekend cannot be fully described by just looking at the statistics. His 13 points (4 kill blocks/2 aces) came at the perfect time for his team, almost choosing the hardest moments of the match to shine.”

Shoji, 33, has also played a major role in Zaska’s success.

Shoji, college volleyball’s first ever four-year All-American while at Stanford, comes from volleyball royalty. His father Dave Shoji is the winningest coach in women’s Division I college history, guiding Hawaii to four national championships before retiring in 2017. Erik’s older brother Kawika was an All-American setter at Stanford and longtime member of the U.S. national team, joining Erik and Smith in claiming a bronze medal at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

In the Smiths, Shoji has found a second family in Poland.

Shoji has an apartment with its own entrance on the first floor of the Smith’s house but usually can be found upstairs with the family.

“I wonder in the beginning,” Kelli said, recalling when her husband first invited Shoji to move into the house. “We weren’t that close. Knew his brother better than Erik. Will he be annoyed by us, you know two kids?”

But Shoji and the Smiths have become so close that they created a new family name on social media: the Smojis.

“We just decided, combine our names together,” Shoji said. “I’m part of the family.”

To Cohen and Amelie, Shoji is “Uncle E.”

Cohen, 11, recently had to do a report for school detailing where in the world he would like to go and with whom.

He wrote, “Go to Tokyo with Uncle E because he’ll know all the great places to eat.”

“I joke he’s like my third child because I feed him most of the time,” Kelli said. “He’ll text me, especially after games, ‘What do we have to eat?’ Erik and I really connect really well. Really good friendship. We get each other. So sometimes I feel like I’m his person here when he needs to vent something. He knows he can do that with me. It’s funny because last year when I went home in April. His dad texted me, ‘Who is going to take care of Erik now?’”

“I was like he’s fine. He can take care of himself.”

David Smith has come to view Shoji as more than just a teammate.

“It’s a friendship that has been taken to another level just because we can spend so much time together,” Smith said. “We rely on each other a lot, and my wife, and my kids love him as well. I love him as a teammate and a friend and we’ve developed a really good relationship over the last couple of years. We’ve spent so much time together that people just joke that we’re just one family and we are. Not by blood, but by circumstance, what we’ve gone through.”

That journey includes the disappointment of failing to medal at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, a memory that continues to haunt Smith and Shoji as they head into this week’s Nations League play.

“To get to the top, to get that gold medal at the next Olympics that’s obviously our main goal, our main target for the next year,” Smith said “We always talk about the margin being thin, razor thin, the difference between good and great is like one ball. How do we have the discipline and muscle memory and chemistry that those points count when you need to? So I don’t think there needs to be a whole overhaul of offensive systems, defensive systems, blah, blah, blah. I think it’s really about playing a little bit more efficiently together and at the end, you need a little bit of luck for sure. The ball touches the line, ball’s out a centimeter and it changes the whole game sometimes. But I truly do believe you make your own luck and put yourself in that situation to take advantage of that luck every once in a while. I think we have a great group. I think we have a ton of talent, ton of experience and I’m super excited to see the direction of this program over the next year. I think we have a great group of guys, I love playing with them. I think we’re all focused on making something special in Paris.”

A big reason for Team USA’s confidence going into Nations League play, and the Olympic qualifying tournament in Japan later this fall, is the play of the 6-foot-7 Smith.

“He’s playing some of the best volleyball of his career at age 36, 37, 38,” Shoji said. “So it’s been really inspiring to watch as someone who has seen him now for 11, 12 years on the court, I can honestly say this is the best volleyball he’s played, I think, in his career and he’s doing it at that age in this position that he’s in. I think it’s basically unheard of, so he’s kind of just an inspiration for us to see as younger players that you can still go, still do it and he’s become more of a leader. He’s kind of this silent leader that leads by example. Because maybe you might not notice him but at the end and you’re looking at the stats, he’s hitting for a great percentage, touching a lot of balls and getting a lot of blocks.

“He’s really come into a role that maybe he didn’t quite embrace when he was younger. He is a little bit undersized in the volleyball world at 6-7, 6-8, you know he’s undersized. But he’s accepted that in the last couple of years, and he goes, ‘I might be undersized but I’m going to carve you up, I’m going to beat you and get great touches.’ I think in the past he’s compared himself to a 6-10, 6-11, and 7-footers and now he’s not doing that and just kind of coming into his own and performing the best he has in a while.”

Often, Smith, who has a degree in civil engineering, has also simply outsmarted opponents.

“Well I think he’s smarter than most people in this world just from an academic side, someone who can analyze a game and numbers and statistics and where people are on the court and figure out a way to get the job done,” Shoji said. “So I think in general he’s just a smart person. But he’s very analytical, he’s an engineer, he can look at something and deconstruct it and figure out a way to get it done.”

Smith’s success, both with Team USA and Zaska in recent years, followed a series of honest conversations with Kelli.

“He’s truly passionate about the game and he’s always trying to make himself better,” Kelli said. “Probably around 34, 35, there was a lot of talk about, oh, he’s getting older, he’s getting older and he started to express that as well, ‘Oh, maybe it’s because he’s getting older and I refused to allow that to be an excuse. That’s my personality. I was like no, you’re going to keep going. If you’re going to go, go. Don’t even say that anymore because now he’s just like just whatever, joking about it. Then, I think it was sinking in a little too much and I was thinking, like, if you even keep talking about that it’s going to get in your head and at this level you need to be operating with the most confidence that you can.

“And so he’s been really blessed to not have a lot of injuries. I think his body was made to do what he’s doing. He’s got a wife at home and I don’t accept complacency because I’ve said we have to all, all of us, have to be all in for this to work.

“I have to be. That’s my personality and it’s not his personality. On the court, you see a very aggressive David Smith who is really passionate and fiery and he’ll yell. In real life, he’s much more mild-mannered and passive. So sometimes in his career, he’s needed a little bit of a shove to say, ‘Hey, is this all you’ve got? Are you giving it all because again this is a team effort at home as well.”

David Smith was asked how much longer he saw himself playing.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought, I genuinely thought I would be done after Tokyo. That was the end game. But my body has been great. My family has been great. They love living overseas in Poland. We have a great club that takes care of us there. Obviously we’re super successful, we’re back to back to back European champions right now. So there’s been no reason to stop. The main goal is to make it to Paris, make an Olympic team. But we’ll see what happens after that. My son is old enough that it would be nice to give him some stability for my child that I remember having. He’s around that age and I would love to give him that experience. But it would be nice to settle down and see him thrive and see what he’s interested in. I’m still motivated and inspired.

“Right now I just have next summer in my mind.”

SHOWING THAT YOU CARE

Cohen Smith is his parent’s son.

Recently he informed David and Kelli that he had a new classmate, a boy whose family fled Ukraine.

“And my wife and I were trying to get him to think about it a little bit,” David recalled, “Who is it? Where is he from? Why is he here? How do you think he’s feeling right now? My son was like, ‘Oh, wait, he’s probably a little nervous, probably a little scared, probably out of place, just like I was when I first came to (Kedzierzyn-Kozle).”

David Smith is also still trying to connect, still trying to level life’s playing field.

Families with deaf children will drive hours to meet Smith at Zaska matches. Before a match four years ago he was approached by a friend. A mother had a deaf child and would Smith mind meeting her?

Smith agreed.

“She just had some questions and you could see the second you met her it was just a mom like so many out there, ‘I just don’t know what to do. I have a child, I love my child, I want what’s best for my child and I don’t know how to do it.’

“And I said, ‘You’re doing a great job first of all, you’re doing enough, you’re doing more than enough, just this conversation shows that you care.’ Meeting the child, so he can see someone growing up, because I really didn’t have that growing up, it wasn’t like I had a deaf athlete (to look up to), ‘Oh, I can do that.’ I was super happy about that.”

Today the boy is a champion swimmer.

“The cool thing about sign language is it’s not an international language but I can understand Polish sign language, a shared sign understanding.”

Kelli Smith is driven by her own sense of understanding, shaped both by her natural instinct and the place she now calls home, always moving forward, looking not waiting for opportunities to change her section of the world.

She is back running through the forest around Blechhammer regularly, past the camp’s gate, past its moss covered crumbling walls, past the crematorium, past the watchtowers, history’s ghosts tracking a dreamer as she moves through a nightmare, soft steps over a hard and bloody past.

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