Unable to transform from SOAP response with CDATA block to a POJO in FSW 6

Issue

We have a Switchyard project which is using a component reference with a SOAP binding. This SOAP service is not a very common SOAP service in the sense that the response of the operation contains CDATA blocks which in turn contains the XML structure we need:

For example:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
   <soap:Body>
      <ns2:GetStatisticsResponse xmlns:ns2="http://web.service.com/">
         <return><![CDATA[<statistics name="Foo">
    <value>100</value>
    <clickthrough>20</clickthrough>
</statistics>]]></return>
      </ns2:GetStatisticsResponse>
   </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

We are interested in the statistics element and its subelements within the CDATA block.

Our problem is that we need a transformer to go from this SOAP response to a POJO which contains the Java representation of this statistics element.

We do not want to parse the DOM ourselves via a Java transformer, but want to use Smooks for this. We were able to transform the SOAP response to a String, but we would need an additional transformation to parse this String into XML fields to populate the POJO with. How can this be done in FSW 6?