...When WW I broke out, he and his wife, Ada, fled Krakow, first to Prague, then to Paris. After the war, around 1921, they returned to Krakow for the next eighteen years until the rise of German Nazism. Inasmuch as Ada was Jewish, they wisely decided to once more flee Krakow and what they (but few others) foresaw as almost certain death. The only problem was, they fled in the wrong direction--east--out of the frying pan into the fire of Russian-controlled territory. Hofman barely escaped capture by the advancing Soviets, though he saw and helped many of his countrymen who hadn't, even going so far as painting their portraits on rough cardboard, then sending them to the soldiers' loved ones. His efforts along this line number in the hundreds. As others in the same straits perished, Hofman joined the Polish Legion, not much of a fighting force, but one which managed to escape the war, traveling though Istanbul to Haifa, then Tel Aviv, finally arriving in Jerusalem in 1942. There, Hofman and his wife spent the remainder of the war. Strangely, there is virtually no overt reference to war in any of Hofman's paintings. It's as if it never happened. After the war, Hofman returned to Krakow for a short time, then, in 1947, moved to an obscure little town of about 7,000 in mountains of southwestern Poland. There he produced mostly religious paintings for the local church and portraits of local residents, gradually gaining national and international recognition as Poland's most popular postwar painter. He died in Szklarska Poręba (by then a popular ski resort) in 1970 at the age of 89. Though not exactly a headliner in most art history books, Wlastimil Hofmanhas been given a starring role in the art history of Poland, an artist who first survived (two wars), then thrived. [https://art-now-and-then.blogspot.nl/2014/07/wlastimil-hofman.html]