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Adolfo Kaminsky Page 3


  Here I must add that I didn’t have just one lab at my disposal, but two. When Maurice Cachou, who was in charge of forged papers for the MLN, heard of my achievements, he contacted me directly to ask whether I could do photoengraving. At that time, to avoid lengthy journeys with their police checks, I’d left the Young Men’s Hostel and had taken a room in another boarding house in Rue Jacob, very close to the 6th’s laboratory. I made a pretense of being an amateur photographer, and the boarding-house cook, who’d become fond of me, let me have a room above mine that she kept empty, assuming I was using it for photographic experiments. In fact, it was there that I set up the MLN research laboratory for forged papers.

  Another maid’s room, but this time one with an address that was absolutely secret, since I was the only person to have access to it. It was there that I converted the paper, at night, and where, thanks to photoengraving processes, I reproduced an endless stream of stamps, letterhead paper and watermarks. All the blank documents came from my Rue Jacob lab. Everything there was improvised, set up with materials salvaged from junk shops and bits and pieces. But by cobbling things together I managed to reproduce highly sophisticated machines, as good as those in real photoengraving studios. Since centrifugal force was the only effective way of spreading the photosensitive fluid on the plates, I invented a centrifuge made from a bicycle wheel. My pipe made an excellent tool for smoothing out documents impaired by acid substances. In fact that was all I used it for—I’ve never smoked. With converging and diverging lenses and a little semi-transparent mirror, I reproduced a machine used by Leonardo da Vinci that projected a virtual image of the drawing—or stamp—to be reproduced by hand, making a very precise line possible. That was all hand-crafted but very effective! And since I was constantly having to invent things, I spent a lot of sleepless nights.

  Every morning, all I had to do was to take the blank documents to the 6th’s laboratory to be filled in; it was so close I didn’t have to use the metro.

  Our services were made available to everyone. Orders poured in. In ever greater numbers. They came from Paris, from the UGIF, from the South Zone, from London. We had to maintain a rhythm of work that verged upon the unmanageable, sometimes up to five hundred documents a week.

  In general it was Otter and I who liaised with those who passed on the orders. I remember that, like me, his appearance was naïve and innocent. It was our best cover. He was short, with sandy hair and freckles, a very small nose and an impish look. A babyish, juvenile look—an open sesame to every door. He was the one who was most often in contact with the Jewish networks; I with the MLN and the communists. But that could change, depending on emergencies. In general we arranged our rendezvous in some busy part of Paris, preferably with a woman. We would meet appearing to be lovers on a date. I always arrived first, each time carrying a rose. Then my ‘fiancée’ and I would ‘go for a walk’ together, making sure we exchanged affectionate glances whenever we felt we might be being observed. By the time we separated we both knew what we had to do.

  That day my rendezvous wasn’t with one of my lady loves but with Marc Hamon, alias ‘Penguin’, the man who’d recruited me when I joined the Resistance; he too was a member of the EIF.

  I knew that if Penguin was coming in person, it must be because his problem was so urgent that he couldn’t wait until one of the young women in the network was available. We were to meet in the Tuileries garden. When I arrived I found him sitting on a bench looking particularly tired and worried. I commented that he had lost weight since we first met, at which he laughed and returned the compliment. Then he started to speak in more serious tones.

  “Yesterday Radio London gave us some good news. The German army is retreating on all fronts, and from now on we have all the armies of North Africa on our side. The problem is that the Nazis have decided to speed up the process of clearing out the Jews by preparing a huge roundup over the whole of the territory. In three days time, ten children’s homes across Paris are going to be raided simultaneously. I have a list for you. I need everything: ration cards, birth certificates, baptismal certificates, plus identity cards for the adults taking them across the border, their orders and the pass for the whole group.”

  “How many?”

  “How many children? … More than three hundred.”

  Three hundred children. That meant more than nine hundred different documents to make. In three days! It was impossible. In general the requests came in bundles of thirty to fifty a day, sometimes a few more. It wasn’t the first big challenge I’d faced, but in this case the shock was almost too much for me. As I left Penguin, for the first time I was afraid I might fail. Up to that point I’d always managed, through my accumulation of miscellaneous knowledge, to find almost miraculous solutions to technical problems. The better the documents became, the more I’d needed to invent, to show ingenuity in forging the unforgeable with the limited means at my disposal. But this time it wasn’t solutions we needed, but quantity, and I knew that I’d reached the maximum productivity I was capable of already. The hours in a day can’t be condensed, and unfortunately they can’t be prolonged either. No time to think it over. First of all I had to run over to Rue Jacob to make paper: closely woven, nice and compact, or fine, textured or untextured, depending on the nature of the documents to be made. I had to hurry, the stopwatch was already running, the race was starting. A race against the clock, against death.

  When, after having left Penguin, I reach the laboratory, out of breath and clutching my case of documents to be filled out, I find Otter, Suzie and Herta there waiting, faithful to their post. But I’m astonished to see that Water Lily’s with them. It’s rare to find her at the laboratory now that she’s taken up other duties. They all look at me, devastated. As far as the three hundred children are concerned, they tell me that they’ve been informed already, which explains the presence of Water Lily, who’s come to give us a hand. But, beyond that, Otter has just received an order from the MOI, which needs papers for its Hungarian unit. They look at me questioningly. What they want to know is: does the lab really have the capacity to meet the challenge?

  I put the cardboard boxes with blank documents down on the table and, in the tone the situation demands, give the signal.

  “The children come first!” Water Lily adds.

  Immediately the lab’s a hive of activity: Water Lily at the guillotine to trim boards for the cards, Suzie coloring in, Herta filling out, by hand and by typewriter. Only Otter, who usually never joins in the production of the cards but looks after all the administrative details, is going around and around like a lost soul.

  “If you want to help, you can start stamping and signing the documents.”

  He gets to work at once, while I make the papers look older using a machine I made myself: I insert some dust and pencil lead, then turn the handle to make them look dirty and worn, so that they don’t look too new or as if they’ve just come from the printer’s. The room is gradually pervaded by the smell of the chemicals mingled with that of sweat. Left, right and center we’re trimming, cutting out, stamping, coloring, typing, slaving away in our makeshift document factory. Then we stuff the backs of the mirrors and the false-bottomed drawers full of forged papers. Deep down inside we all know that we haven’t much chance of getting there, but we take care not to say it. Everything depends on our will-power. After all, the only thing we have is optimism, our only means of making progress.

  When it gets dark and we all go home, I head off to my other laboratory, the one on Rue Jacob. How could I sleep when, in a whole day and with the help of Water Lily and Otter’s unexpected contribution, we haven’t finished a quarter of the papers for the children? What I can’t bear is the thought that at this rate we might perhaps manage to fulfill the order of papers for the children, but only at the sacrifice of the Hungarians.

  Stay awake. For as long as possible. Fight against sleep. It’s a simple calculation: in one hour I can make thirty blank documents; if I sleep for an hour, thi
rty people will die…

  After two nights of work—interminable, painstaking work, my eye stuck to the microscope—it’s exhaustion that’s my worst enemy. I have to hold my breath; forging papers is a meticulous task—your hand mustn’t tremble at all. Truly delicate work. Most of all I dread a technical mistake, a little slip, an infinitesimal detail that might escape me. Just a momentary lapse of concentration can be fatal, and the life or death of a human being hangs on every document. I check and recheck every sheet. They’re perfect. But the doubt remains. I check them again. The stress has gone, but what is worse, I’m literally nodding off. I get to my feet vigorously to wake myself up, take a few steps, slap myself several times. Then I sit down again. One hour equals thirty lives! I don’t have the right to give up. I blink and squint my eyes to clear my vision. Is it my printing that’s blurred or my eyes that can’t see anymore in the dimness of the darkroom?

  The next day the lab in the Rue des Saints-Pères is seething with excitement.

  We’re approaching the finishing line. At five this afternoon Otter and Water Lily will go off with our finished articles, all that we’ve had the time to make, the fruit of three days’ unremitting labor. This morning we’ve gotten to more than eight hundred finished documents, and I’m finally starting to feel confident. By always repeating the same movements, furiously, like robots, we’re working faster than ever, deftly and without respite. Our clothes are greasy and stink of chemicals, we’re dripping with sweat, but there is something new in the air on this day, something intangible in the atmosphere. Euphoria! We count out loud to encourage ourselves: 810, 811, 812… carried along by the rhythmical music of the incessant tap-tap of the typewriters, the smack of the guillotine, the thump of the stamps, the click of the stapler and the rumble of the machine that makes the paper look older.

  Intoxicated in the swirl of action, I suddenly see a dark veil pass over my eyes. Then, all of a sudden, it’s a total blackout. I blink, squint my eyes, feel my eyelids. Still nothing. Blind. My hearing’s been taken over by a continuous buzzing, my hands are numb. Suddenly I feel myself lose control of my body.

  It seems there was a great crash when I collapsed and tumbled to the ground.

  When I woke up, my head was on the floor and all I could see was dark patches. Water Lily took me to one of the network’s liaison agents who lived nearby to look after me. I was so afraid that without me the documents wouldn’t be completed in time, that I insisted they shouldn’t let me sleep for more than one hour. I remember something Water Lily said then that has fixed within me the sense of responsibility for the lives of others: “We need a forger, Adolphe, not another corpse.”

  1. Service du travail obligatoire—the Compulsory Labor Service under which hundreds of thousands of French workers were compelled to enlist and were sent to Germany as forced labor.

  2. The Jewish Scouts of France, the Éclaireuses et éclaireurs israélites de France, known as the EEIF or the EIF. [MM]

  3. Union générale des Israélites de France—the General Union of French Jews, an organization set up by the Nazis along the same lines as the Jewish Councils formed in occupied central European countries to collaborate in the deportations.

  4. List of organizations: Zionist Youth Movement; Jewish Combat (sometimes “Fighting”) Organization; Organization to Save the Children; National Liberation Movement; Liberation North; Irregulars and Partisans, of which MOI, the Immigrant Workers, a resistance organization of immigrant workers from the French Confederation of Trade Unions, was part.

  5. The French Resistance that operated mainly in rural areas. [MM]

  2

  “HOW DOES one become a forger?”

  “Why? Is it a job opportunity you’re interested in?”

  How does one become a forger? I’d say… by chance. Well, not entirely. It turned out that during the years before I joined the Resistance I’d unwittingly accumulated all the knowledge I would need. After that, all I had to do was to apply it.

  Like many adolescents, during the war I dreamed of being in the Resistance. I greatly admired the men who fought in the maquis, although I was a pacifist myself, incapable of bearing a gun. Even when I was at elementary school it was my little brother who, stronger and braver than me, stood up for me when there were fights. I was the gentle one of the family, timid, contemplative. I dreamed of being a painter but ‘that’s not a trade,’ they’d tell me. What is certain is that without that situation, without the war, I would have led the most ordinary of lives. I would have been a dyer, at most a chemist.

  My training, if I may put it like that, began when I went to live in Vire, in Normandy. I was thirteen.

  It wasn’t the first time we’d moved. The history of my family is typical of that of most Eastern European Jews during those years: a history of repeatedly being exiled, often by force. My parents, both of them Russian, met in Paris in 1916. My mother had fled the pogroms and chosen the ‘country of the rights of man’. As for my father, he never told us the reasons for his coming to France, but I know that he was a journalist for the newspaper of the Bund,1 and I’m sure it was his sympathy with Marxist ideology that had forced him into exile. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the French government ordered the immediate expulsion of all Russian nationals who were considered to be ‘reds’. As a former member of the Bund, my father was on their lists. In the middle of the First World War it was impossible to return to Russia, and that is how my parents ended up in Argentina. My brothers and I were born in Buenos Aires, and the whole family obtained Argentine nationality. I was less than five when my parents decided to return to Paris.

  In 1938 we went to live in Normandy with my Uncle Léon, my mother’s younger brother. He was a complex personality, a self-made man who’d come up the hard way and who, though he could appear extremely irritable, finicky, sometimes even tyrannical, was infinitely kind and devoted to us. He was the one who’d paid for our move to France, who’d found work for my father in Paris and even our accommodation. He had no children of his own and since, in his mind, a house without bursts of laughter and uproarious merriment was synonymous with sadness, he’d had a huge house built, cut into two identical halves in the hope that one day we would come to live there. The events of 1938, the annexation of Austria by Germany and the reports of the tracking down of the Jews, indicated the imminence of war and sped up our reunion. Clearly the capital was becoming too dangerous for a family such as ours, both foreign and Jewish.

  And it’s true that during the first years of the war we were protected in Vire. The people there made us welcome, partly because of my uncle’s reputation as an honest stall-holder. Out there everyone knew and respected him. He’d become French because he’d volunteered during the 1914-18 war, in which he’d lost one of his lungs.

  At that time, I had the only diploma I ever obtained in my whole life, the certificate attesting that I had completed elementary school. As I was still under fourteen, they sent me to school until I was old enough to leave. The fact that I came from Paris gave me a special status in Vire. At school the boys admired me. And, I may add, the girls, with whom I took the path to the school across the countryside, singing rounds.

  There was one, Dora Augier, who was very timid and always stayed close to me. I liked her a lot, but I was careful to avoid running into her father, an old man who looked like a pirate captain because of his wooden leg.

  There was another boy who, like me, already had his certificate. This was Bragantti, a lively, impish little Italian with whom I immediately hit it off. Since we’d already finished the curriculum the principal, M. Madeline, who didn’t want to let us spend the whole year getting bored, suggested setting up a school cooperative and using the money for the two of us to create a school newspaper. We bought a cheap old printing press and salvaged worn block letters and out-of-fashion fonts from printers as well as from the regional daily paper, which was not unhappy to get rid of them while at the same time doing something for the school.
It was both educational and fun, and lucrative as well. We sold the newspaper in order to top up the fund and to buy new, more efficient equipment.

  Bragantti and I spent the school year discovering the principles of typography, the means of printing drawings in the desired quantity, and engraving. At the early age of thirteen I was already fascinated by printing.

  My elder brother Paul was old enough to go out to work and my parents had decided that, to thank my uncle for his generosity, Paul would help him at the markets. Léon sold hosiery in the squares of the towns in the area. The problem was that they both had quick tempers, and Léon was not used to someone standing up to him. There was one argument after another, and the whole house suffered from their quarrels. In order to calm things down, my mother decided one day that, since I already had my certificate and was more docile, I would leave school and replace Paul. A nightmare for me, who has always been allergic to commerce and now had to abandon the enjoyable school print room, and that’s not to mention that my uncle had the annoying habit of rebuking his assistants with a kick in the butt. In time, I would’ve certainly been able to become reconciled to selling, but the public humiliation on the other hand, no, definitely not.

  After a few weeks out in the cold being ill-treated by Léon, I ran off to get myself taken on at the factory on the corner—even lying about my age, since I wasn’t fourteen yet. The Société générale électrique made airplane instrument panels for the French army. I would have accepted anything rather than the markets. And it turned out that I liked the factory pretty well. It was a new world for me where I met people who were to be important for my life. As I was young, I was taken on as an apprentice, and I was put in the wiring section, with the women. Aha, I can see you’re smiling. You’re going to be disappointed—they were all much older than me; I had no chance at all. On the other hand, they confided in me, and I took that very seriously. I learned a lot. There was one who was sweet, she must have been about twenty. Cécile. She was roguish and funny.