Adolfo Kaminsky’s talent was as simple as it gets: he knew how to get blue ink off paper that was impossible to get off. Well, during World War II this skill saved the lives of thousands of Jews in France.
As a teenager working for a dyer and dry cleaner in his town in Normandy, he had learned how to remove these kinds of stains. When he was 18, he joined the anti-Nazi resistance. Because of his experience, he was able to change official French identity cards and food ration cards with Jewish-sounding names such as Abraham or Isaac to names more similar to those of French people who were not Jewish.
Jewish children, their parents and other people could avoid being sent to Auschwitz and other concentration camps because of the false documents. In many cases, they were also able to leave Nazi-controlled areas and go to safer places.
At some point, Mr. Kaminsky to find 900 birth and baptism certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutions on the verge of arrest. The aim was to trick the Germans until the children could be sent to families in the countryside, monasteries or Switzerland and Spain. He had three days to complete the project.
He worked non-stop for two days and stayed awake by saying to himself: “I can make 30 blank documents in an hour. If I sleep for an hour, 30 people will die.”
Sarah Kaminsky, his daughter, said Mr Kaminsky passed away at his home in Paris on Monday. He was 97. His story sounds like it comes from a spy book.
Adolfo Kaminsky’s talent was as banal as it gets: he knew how to remove supposedly indelible blue ink from paper. But it was a skill that helped save the lives of thousands of Jews in France during World War II. https://t.co/dVK3FPPmyk
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 9, 2023
Mr. Kaminsky, whose name was Julien Keller, was a key member of an underground laboratory in Paris whose members all worked for free and risked quick death if discovered. They used names like Water Lily, Penguin and Otter and often invented documents from scratch.
Mr. Kaminsky learned to make various typefaces in grade school when he was in charge of the school newspaper. He was able to copy the fonts used by the authorities. He printed the paper so that it also looked like the kind used on official documents. He also photographed his own stamps, letterheads and watermarks.
Other resistance groups learned about the cell, and soon it was making 500 documents a week on behalf of partisans in various European countries. Mr. Kaminsky thought the underground network he was part of saved 10,000 people, most of whom were children.
After Paris was liberated, Mr. Kaminsky working for the new French government. There he fabricated documents that would allow intelligence agents to sneak into Nazi territory and obtain information about the extermination camps.
He continued to create false documents for 30 years after the war, helping rebels in British-ruled Palestine, French Algeria, South Africa, and Latin America. During the Vietnam War, he also made false papers for people who wanted to avoid military service.
“I’ve saved lives because I can’t deal with unnecessary deaths – I just can’t,” he told The New York Times in 2016. “All people are equal, regardless of their origin, their beliefs, their skin color. There are no superiors, no subordinates. That is not acceptable to me.”
The Opinion Section of The Times made a short documentary about Mr Kaminsky called “The Forger” which won an Emmy Award. In the early 1970s, Mr. Kaminsky stopped being a forger and began earning a living as a photographer and photography teacher in Paris. He photographed romantic scenes such as lovers sitting on a bench at night, far away from the chaos of war.
He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on October 1, 1925. Salomon Kaminsky and Anna (Kinol) Kaminsky were both born in Russia, but met in Paris in 1916. His mother had to leave Russia because of the pogroms and his father worked for a Jewish-Marxist newspaper. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsarist government, France kicked out those who supported the new government. The Kaminskys fled to Argentina, where they had two more sons.
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By the early 1930s, the Kaminskys were able to move back to France and live in the Normandy town of Vire. Adolfo dropped out of school when he was 13 to help an uncle run his market stall, but the uncle was too bossy, so the boy dropped out and went to work in a factory making instruments for airplanes.
In 1940, the Germans invaded France. They took over the factory in Normandy and fired everyone who worked there who was Jewish. Adolfo needed a job to support his family, so he answered an ad for an apprentice dyer with a company that turned military uniforms and overcoats into clothes that civilians could wear. The owner, who was a chemical engineer, taught him how to change and remove colors. Adolfo learned how to remove even the toughest stains.
He became so interested in chemistry that he started working as a chemistry assistant at a butter factory. To find out how much fat was in the cream farmers brought in, the dairy put methylene blue in a sample and waited for the lactic acid in the sample to break down the color. That’s how Adolfo found out that lactic acid was the best way to get rid of ID card ink made with Waterman blue ink.
In 1941, the Kaminskys were arrested and sent to Drancy, an internment camp near Paris that was a stopover on the way to the extermination camps. Since they were from Argentina, they were released after three months.
RIP Adolfo Kaminski. When he joined the French Resistance at the age of 17, he fabricated papers that saved the lives of thousands of Jews. He later made fake IDs and money for the Algerian FLN and people who fought against regimes in Greece, Spain and Latin America, as well as for draft evaders in Vietnam. pic.twitter.com/sZmcwKoqNN
— David Broder (@broderly) January 9, 2023
But the family soon became concerned that the passports would no longer protect them. At the age of 18, Adolfo was sent to the French underground to retrieve documents proving they were not Jews. When the Resistance agents learned of his skills, they hired him.
“Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life”, a memoir written in his voice by his daughter Sarah Kaminsky and published in English in 2016, tells the story of how he started working for the resistance in earnest when he discovered that his mother had been killed in a train returning from Paris, where she had gone to warn her brother that he would be arrested.
He was so angry that he did various acts of sabotage, such as applying chemicals to railroad equipment and transmission lines to make them rust and break. He said he was looking for revenge and needed “comfort for his grief”. “For the first time I didn’t feel completely powerless,” he said.
It was dangerous to forge documents. On one occasion, a police officer stopped him on the Paris metro and asked to look into his bag, which contained blank identity papers and counterfeiting tools. Mr. Kaminsky had to think fast, so he told him there were sandwiches and asked if he wanted one. The officer continued.
Sad news of the death of Adolfo Kaminsky, the heroic counterfeiter who used his skills to save thousands of Jews during the Holocaust and to aid the FLN and other national liberation and anti-fascist groups, as well as those who evaded conscription in imperialist wars. Rest in strength ✊ https://t.co/2M7UNYVcb3
— Donal Hassett (@donalhassett1) January 9, 2023
Several of Mr. Kaminsky’s underground friends were caught and killed, and the stress of working so hard for hours caused him to lose sight in one eye.
In 1950 he married Jeanine Korngold, but they separated in 1952. He married Leila Bendjebour in 1974. In addition to his daughter Sarah from his second marriage, Mr. Kaminsky is survived by his wife and their two sons, Atahualpa and José. Youcef, his daughter Marthe from his first marriage, his sister Pauline Gerlich and nine grandchildren. Serge, one of his sons from his first marriage, suffered a heart attack and passed away in 2021.
In a talk she gave in Paris in 2010, Sarah Kaminsky talked about the first time she saw what her father did for a living. She said she got a bad grade in school and needed her mother’s signature to show she told her parents. So she lied about it.
Her mother immediately saw that it was fake and told her to stop, but her father just laughed. “But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder,” he said of her effort. “Can’t you see it’s really too small?”
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