Quote: “It was a sport to kill a Jew,” he says. “[Your typical Nazi] is not going to go in the mud and get dirty and filthy; he is doing it for happiness, for enjoyment. So when it was raining, I knew I was safe.”

Smart is a Holocaust survivor. He was just nine when the Nazis took away his parents and younger sister, leaving him completely alone. He lost more than 60 members of his family in that time. But he did not talk to a single person about it for 70 years. “The Holocaust did not exist,” he says. “It was taboo in my house. My children didn’t know anything.

“After the war I could not allow myself to think about the torture of my past. I wiped it out,” he says. He changed his name – from Oziac Fromm to Maxwell Smart – and never looked back. The only hint at the atrocities he witnessed lay in the vivid, expressionist works he painted as an artist: the fir boughs he used to build shelter in the forest, the trees he would look up at while he was daydreaming.

Smart was born in 1930 to a Czech mother and Polish father. When he was a young child, the family moved from Czechoslovakia (as it then was) to Buczacz, a small city which was then part of Poland (now Buchach, it is part of Ukraine).

He remembers flashes of his prewar childhood: family dinners before shabbat; dressing up for synagogue; his uncle – a cartoonist for a newspaper – taking an interest in his art after Smart was praised for it at school. He and his younger sister Zonia were well looked after. His father ran a clothing store and “looked like an English gentleman – he never went out of the house without a fedora hat!”. About half of the 8,000 people who lived in Buczacz were Jewish.

After the second world war broke out, Buczacz came under Soviet occupation. The economy tanked and his father’s shop went out of business. Then, in July 1941, the Nazis seized Buczacz. A contact of Smart’s father offered the family safe passage into the Soviet Union – but his mother wanted to stay. They had a life in Buczacz and news of the camps had not made it there. “Nobody knew about the horrors the Germans created,” says Smart. 

Under Nazi occupation, militias patrolled the streets, attacking Jewish people and businesses, destroying Smart’s synagogue. The Nazis were joined by the Ukrainians – who saw them as liberators. Smart often played with the neighbouring children, who were Ukrainian. One day, his mother went to see if they would be interested in buying some of the Smarts’ possessions in exchange for food. “The neighbour says to her: ‘You have no right to sell anything – anything that is Jewish belongs to the government.’”

One day a notice was given for all Jewish men aged 18-50 to register for labour. Smart’s father was ordered to the town square along with 350 others. His father told him he’d be right back. On the square, the men were separated into two groups: one for professional workers (doctors, lawyers, teachers); one for skilled tradesmen. The professionals, including Smart’s father, were taken to a nearby hill and shot. Smart did not find this out until many years later.

The families were told that their men would be released if they relinquished their assets. “I remember my mother went to borrow money to pay them off,” he says. “It was all just a story. They were already dead. They collected the money but I never saw my father again.”

Buczacz’s Jewish community was moved into a ghetto and forced into labour. On one trip home from shovelling wheat, Smart and dozens of others were taken away in trucks by armed guards. They were stripped and imprisoned for three days. “I remember being in jail without food, without water. I was creative: I took off my shoe, I pushed it out through the window to catch snow in the shoe to have some water. Everybody shared it.”