In the summer of 2019, my wife and I visited the
Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and had the opportunity to see a
remarkable exhibition about Adolfo Kaminsky, a man credited with saving
the lives of at least 10,000 Jews in France during World War II.
The Early Years
Adolfo Kaminsky’s parents were Russian
Jews who met and married in Paris. His
mother had fled to Paris from the pogroms in Russia, and his father, a
journalist for a Jewish Marxist newspaper in Russia, was forced to leave. Because
of his father’s alleged ties to the Jewish Labor Bund, Adolfo’s parents were
expelled from France and spent time in Turkey and in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
where Adolfo was born in 1925. They later returned to France, eventually settling
in the town of Vire, in Normandy, in 1932.
The family was poor, and young Adolfo
soon found work as a clothes dyer and dry cleaner, where he learned the magic
of colors and how to use various chemicals. Kaminsky also worked on a dairy
farm, where he performed chemical tests to verify milk quality and discovered
that lactic acid could be used to remove supposedly indelible black ink from
paper. These skills would serve him well in his work
for the French Resistance during World War II.
Forgery Activity
In 1943, during the Nazi occupation of
France, 17-year-old Kaminsky and his family were arrested by the occupying
Germans and imprisoned in the notorious transit camp in Drancy. Luckily, in
1944, thanks to his Argentine passport and intervention by the Argentine
consulate, Adolfo was one of the few to get out of Drancy, thus escaping
deportation to Auschwitz. He then embarked on a clandestine double life, during
which he worked as an artist during the day under the pseudonym Julien Keller
but had a secret second career as the primary forger for the underground
resistance in Paris.
With his artistic ability, Kaminsky was
able to masterfully reproduce official documents, including identification
papers, birth certificates, marriage certificates, baptism records, travel
permits, and ration cards. His forgery
repertoire included the fabrication of authentic-appearing papers and the
use of inks, dyes, seals, solvents, quills, a stapler, and bindings of all
kinds, as well as typography, signature forging, stain removal, and the
production of rubber stamps. He even used a bicycle to run a
centrifuge for drying paper.
Kaminsky’s false documents helped people
cross borders and saved at least 10,000 Jews, including many children, from
being deported to concentration camps. Over one three-day period with
little sleep, he processed 900 different false documents that saved 300
institutionalized children from being rounded up for deportation. He did all of
this at great personal risk and took no payment for his work. He knew that if
he were caught, he would be imprisoned and killed.
Activity after the War
After
Paris was liberated, Kaminsky worked for the French government to fabricate
documents that allowed intelligence agents to penetrate Nazi territory and
gather evidence about the death camps. He also used his forgery skills to help
the Bricha movement smuggle displaced Jews into Mandatory Palestine and to
support Irgun and Lehi militants working for Jewish independence. In addition,
he forged documents on behalf of the Algerian National Liberation
Front, the African National Congress anti-apartheid movement in South
Africa, and revolutionary movements in Latin America. Later, he even fabricated
papers for Americans trying to evade the draft during the Vietnam
War. Kaminsky finally retired from his three-decade forgery career in 1971. He
moved to Algeria but eventually returned to Paris, where he worked as a
commercial photographer.
Final Chapter
Kaminsky
kept his past cloaked in secrecy well into his eighties, when he described his
life’s work to his daughter Sarah. She wrote his gripping story in A
Forger's Life, a 2009 biography, using his own words. In 2016, an
English translation was published. There are several excellent Kaminsky
documentaries, including Forging Identities, released in 2000,
and an Emmy Award-winning documentary released by the New York Times in 2016. During an interview for the Times documentary, Kaminsky was asked
about the motivation for his work. His answer was, “If I hadn’t been able to do
anything, I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.” Adolfo Kaminsky died in
France on January 9, 2023, at age 97. He is survived by his wife, two
daughters, two sons, nine grandchildren, and the many offspring of the people
he saved.
