The Untold Story of Adolfo Kaminsky: The Forger Who Changed History

2023-12-25 03:57:00
Adolfo Kaminsky used a technique that allowed changing names in documents

“Neutrality does not exist. “Not doing anything, not saying anything, is already being an accomplice,” Adolfo Kaminsky once told his daughter Sarah, as an old man, and that was the starting point for him to reveal to her what he had never told, because if he knew how to do something Kaminsky was to compartmentalize, hide, remain silent, customs of the life of a clandestine militant.

When her father began to tell her and did not stop, Sarah understood a fact that had disturbed her in childhood and that, until that moment, was inexplicable to her. Her anecdote had not faded from her memory: one day, to hide her bad grades, she had forged her mother’s signature on the school report card and, of course, They discovered about her. She expected the worst, but when Adolfo found out and saw her clumsy forged signature, instead of punishing her she couldn’t contain her laughter. “Daughter, you could have tried a little harder! “Did you make the letter too small?” He told her, amused.

Kaminsky was born in Buenos Aires and at the age of five he left for France with his family.

Sarah was taken aback by her father’s reaction. I did not know then that if there was something that Adolfo could do masterfully, it was falsify, not only signatures, but also all types of documents, and that with that skill he had saved the lives of thousands of Jews in France during the Nazi occupation, when he had just a few years older than her.

She understood everything when, as an adult, her father decided to tell her his life and she was able to write his biography, Adolfo Kaminsky. The Forger, a fascinating story that – if it were not true – could compete with the best spy novels by John Le Carré or Graham Greene.

With the publication of the book, the man who had always kept his life in the shadows became in the headlines of newspapers and magazines “a maker of freedom”, “the Argentine Schindler” – because Adolfo was born here, although he left chiquito- and, above all, “the magician of ink”.

Because it all started when he was 16 years old and someone from the French Resistance told him that they couldn’t erase the blue Waterman ink from certain documents to change their names and he responded: “I know how to erase it. “Everything can be erased.”

The Kaminsky family was arrested in 1943 and transferred to the Drancy concentration camp, on the outskirts of Paris.

Adolfo Kaminsky was born in Buenos Aires almost by chance on October 1, 1925. His parents, Russian Jews living in France, left that country because the man, a tailor by trade and a Marxist by conviction, was expelled because he wrote in a communist publication. and he was accused of participating in a Bolshevik conspiracy.

They spent a short time in Argentina, since in 1930 the couple, now with their two children born in these lands, were able to return to France, where they had left relatives. In any case, that short stay would be very useful to them later, because they returned to Europe with passports that gave them Argentine citizenship.

They settled in Normandy, in the city of Vire, where Adolfo began working at a very young age to contribute to the family’s precarious economy. At the age of 13 he started working in a factory in the town, but in 1940, when the Nazis arrived, he was fired along with his brother Pablo because they were Jews.

Then he got the job that would mark his life in a dry cleaner whose specialty was dyeing the uniforms left over from the First World War in other colors. He learned to dye and remove stains, a skill that would later be useful for forging documents.

Adolfo Kaminsky died on January 9, 2022 at the age of 97 (photo Joël SAGET / AFP)

The owner of the dry cleaners, a chemical engineer, taught him how to alter or erase colors and remove the most stubborn stains. The use of substances that produced those effects that seemed wonderful to him led him to set up a small laboratory, where he tried to find even more effective methods.

On weekends – when the dry cleaners were closed – he worked in the chemical area of ​​a dairy factory, where he learned something else that would be essential for his clandestine trade. He discovered that to know the grace content of the milk brought by the dairy farmers, a little methylene blue was placed in a sample and the lactic acid was expected to dissolve it. In other words, that milk acid was capable of erasing methylene blue, a product that was used for certain inks.

The German invaders advanced day by day against the Jews of occupied France: not only did they lose their jobs, but they began to arrest them and send them to concentration camps and from there to extermination.

The entire Kaminsky family was arrested in mid-1943 and transferred to the Drancy concentration camp, outside Paris. They knew that this place was just a stopover to death in other camps, outside of France, where the gas chambers awaited them.

Pablo, Adolfo’s older brother, had an idea that would save them all. He wrote letters addressed to the Argentine consulate in Paris and gave them to railway workers and even threw some out of the window of the train that took them to Drancy.

Adolph Kaminsky and his daughter Sarah (Amit Israeli)

It was like throwing a bottle into the sea, but they were lucky: one of the letters reached the consul who, appealing to Argentine neutrality in the war, demanded that his compatriots holding national passports be released. And he achieved it.

By then the Kaminskys were confined to Drancy. “There were thousands of us. Forty per room. Men and women separated during the night. An anthill. Nobody stayed in Drancy. It is there where they made the selection, before sending the convoys to the different fields in Europe,” Kaminsky would tell his daughter Sarah many years later.

They stayed in Paris, where Adolfo’s father contacted his old colleagues from the Marxist magazine, who by then were participating in the clandestine resistance to the Nazis by falsifying documents for the Jews.

Taking advantage of Adolfo’s young age, which allowed him to move around the streets without arousing too much suspicion, they commissioned him to carry photos and data from here to there to create documents with very French surnames.

He had to pass controls, for which he had to, in turn, control himself. “Keep calm, camouflage my emotions. Above all, don’t let them betray me, not today, not now. Not allowing my leg to beat the beat of unbridled music. Prevent that drop of sweat from forming on my forehead. Reduce blood flow to my veins. Slow down the heartbeat. Breathe slowly. Compress fear. Hide the anguish. Stoic. Everything is alright. I have to fulfill a mission. Nothing is impossible,” she would tell her daughter Sarah about those experiences.

Adolfo’s contact, who used the nom de guerre “Pingüino”, was barely older than him and in one of their meetings he confessed, worried, that they had a lot of problems erasing the names to put others on the documents because they were written in ink. Waterman blue, which resisted all methods they knew.

“Penguin” froze when Adolfo told him: “I can erase it” and told him about the virtues of lactic acid to erase the methylene blue that was used in Waterman ink.

He was assigned to a forgery workshop installed on Rue de Saints-Pères, which operated under the façade of a studio for young painters. His classmates were all Fine Arts students, who exhibited his paintings in front of the store, while behind them they dedicated themselves to their clandestine work. The paints also allowed them to justify the odors of the chemical solvents they used.

They forged passports, birth certificates, ration cards, safe-conduct passes and any paper that could prevent their owners from capture, confinement or death in a concentration camp.

Adolfo himself forged documents in the name of Julien Keller. The demand for documents was continuous and growing, so Adolfo and his colleagues worked almost without rest. On one occasion, he alone had to falsify 300 documents for as many Jewish children, which took him three days without sleep and irreparable damage to one of his eyes, but he managed it.

“Stay awake. The most time possible. Fight sleep. The calculation is simple. In one hour I can produce 30 blank documents. If I sleep for one hour, 30 people will die,” she thought at that time and told Sarah that.

The book written by his daughter Sarah made the story known

The Nazis knew that there was a team of forgers in Paris and that one of them was a real expert, but they were never able to find him. In that, too, his young age helped him.

“I knew, of course, that all the police services were on the trail of the Paris forger. He knew this because he had found a way to produce such a quantity of false documents that, very quickly, they had flooded the entire Northern region, as far as Belgium and the Netherlands. Anyone looking for false documents in France knew that he could obtain them instantly by contacting any branch of the resistance. It was obvious that if everyone knew, so did the police. My main advantage was that the police would probably be looking for a ‘professional’ technician, who had machines, printing presses and a pasta factory; “None of them could suspect that the forger they were looking for was nothing more than a boy,” he says in his daughter’s book.

When the war ended, he was awarded the Croix du Combattant and the Croix du combattant volontaire de la Résistance, and the French secret services summoned him to provide documentation for Jews who wanted to emigrate to Palestine and also for some of their agents. . He did so for some time, but then resigned, outraged by the French government’s repressive policy in Algeria.

He already worked as a photographer, but behind that facade he once again clandestinely fabricated false documents.

For years he provided papers to any fighting organization or persecuted militants who required them: opponents of the Portuguese dictatorship, Latin American liberation movements, North American citizens who wanted to evade the draft to fight in the Vietnam War, Mexican students persecuted after the massacre. from Tlatelolco, resistant to Latin American dictatorships, fighters against the dictatorship of the Colonels in Greece. He himself estimated that, in 1967 alone, he sent false documentation to 15 different countries.

Adolfo and Sarah Kaminsky in 2011. (photo Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)

He also made a single, very particular contribution to the struggles of the French May, helping one of its most conspicuous leaders, Dany “El Rojo”. “Allowing Cohn-Bendit – who was banned from entering France – to re-enter clandestinely was my only contribution to the May uprising,” Sarah writes that her father told her.

In 1971, “The Ink Wizard” decided to definitively abandon his work as a forger in the service of freedom, but many more years would pass before he revealed that secret aspect of his life to his daughter Sarah and she wrote, in 2009, the book that made his story known.

Adolfo Kaminsky died in Paris, at the age of 97, on January 9 of this year and, contrary to what he always said – “everything can be erased” – his life left an indelible mark.

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