Adolfo Kaminsky Read online

  “And Penguin?”

  Penguin, as I later learned, was on a convoy for Auschwitz with the thirty children in his charge. Neither he nor the kids survived it.

  1. Organisation civile et militaire: Civil and Military Organization—one of the Resistance networks in the occupied (northern) zone of France. [MM]

  2. German counterintelligence. [MM]

  5

  SUMMER 1945. Almost a year since everyone took up their lives again from where they had broken off. But the war still wasn’t yet over, and I was still a forger.

  After the liberation of Paris a year before, I’d volunteered for the army as a stretcher-bearer in order to be in the combat zones. I wanted to continue to work in one way or another to help bring the war to an end, but unarmed.

  The army’s secret service was looking for a forger to allow their intelligence agents, parachuted behind enemy lines, to locate the less well-known concentration camps, notably those where medical experiments on human beings were carried out, before the Nazis could destroy all the evidence of their atrocities. Someone or other must have talked, my name have gotten around. One day two men came to see me in the barracks where I was stationed. One was Lieutenant Colonel Pommès-Barrère, head of the Centre de liaison et documentation (CLD) and the Direction générale des études et recherches (DGER) or, if you prefer, of the French army’s counterespionage services. He was accompanied by Major Maillet, head of missions. I immediately took up my post in the DGER. Our department was attached to the Ministère des prisonniers de guerre et des déportés (MPGD),1 the minister of which was a cold-eyed young soldier, scarcely thirty years old, by the name of François Mitterrand. From one day to the next I was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant and lodged in the Hôtel Doisy, close to the Place de l’Étoile, having a whole floor of the CLD at my disposal, and even a car and a driver, with all expenses taken care of by the army. I had become a state forger, a new status, perhaps even with career prospects. As the rules of the secret and intelligence services demanded, I had to work under a double identity, and I’d kept the one I’d had in the Resistance: Julien Adolphe Keller. For everyone else—family, friends, old colleagues from the 6th section—I passed myself off as a clerk, a common ministry pen pusher.

  For a year, until the capitulation of the Axis forces and the liberation of the camps, I made German papers. No sooner had I arrived than I was given models of German travel warrants, train tickets, identity cards, passports, military ID. I also had to make papers for foreign workers in Germany to allow intelligence agents who couldn’t speak German to pass for STO volunteers. Given the urgency and the quantity of forged papers to produce, I was obviously soon under pressure. The work was as delicate as ever, and it was imperative that the forged documents were undetectable. Never having had to make German identity cards before, I was faced with characteristics that were new to me. They had both transparent and opaque watermarks. The rigidity of the paper, the weight and the coloring techniques were all different. Of course I had more technical means at my disposal—I could buy high-performance equipment—but I still had to carry out a large number of experiments and apply my ingenuity.

  I recovered all my equipment from the 6th section laboratory and from my former boarding house in Rue Jacob. In separate rooms on my floor in Hôtel Doisy I’d installed a darkroom, a photoengraving studio, a print room, an office for filling out documents, a room for coloring and deleting, one for making paper and another in which my old Singer sewing machine stood in pride of place; it was the one my father had used to make his customers’ suits and that I used to cut out revenue stamps. I printed them directly on gummed paper and, to make the perforations, I’d replaced the sewing needle with a needle from a syringe that matched the size of the holes exactly.

  On this particular morning it’s barely five o’clock when the first rays of the sun appear in my room in Hôtel Doisy. Through the window I have a view of a colorless sky with a strange, thin, slightly frayed cloud. I put on my coat and hurry out. The six new intelligence agents arrived during the night. I’m going to have a lot to do in the next few days.

  My driver, who waits for me outside the hotel every morning, takes me to the DGER and parks outside the apartment block. Major Maillet is there to greet me and opens the door of the building. With his square jaw and short black hair parted on the side, he looks like an American film actor. His work for the DGER is to train the agents in military espionage before sending them out into enemy territory. Both physical and mental training. Apart from him—he sleeps there—the premises of the CLD, a building with four vast stories composed of little offices either side of a long corridor, are completely empty at this early hour. My floor is right at the top. It’s entirely at my disposal apart from the space behind a door that’s always kept locked and to which Maillet alone has the key. I go up the stairs with Maillet and follow him through that door. This part is laid out like a large apartment with bedrooms, kitchen and shower-room. No one besides Maillet and myself is authorized to go in there or to make contact with the occupants.

  The intelligence agents, accustomed to sleeping with one eye open, appear in the doorways of their bedrooms. Maillet introduces them to me one by one. Six strapping young guys, muscular and well-nourished, scrupulously selected from among the best agents of the army, who’ve just completed two months of arduous military training in a house in the suburbs, the location of which is kept secret. They’re going to be sent to Germany in two groups of three, each group consisting of a leader to supervise operations, a radio operator and an infiltration agent.

  For a parachute operation to be successful, each member of the group has to be provided with all the proofs of his existence in the country. Identity documents, travel permits, rent receipts, library card, sales slip from a store, bus or cinema ticket, railway ticket from such and such a town on such and such a date, prescription for his asthma, an old crumpled letter from his mother or fiancée, with a stamp canceled by the post office.

  Everything a man might carry with him and which, should he be caught, might save his life. And of course that means that each document has to be produced individually and that nothing must be left to chance. I have a week to invent a credible new past for each of them and create the proofs, always making sure their cover is easy for them to assimilate, mixing in a little truth with the false or starting out from their real life history to construct a new one. It’s essential to spend hours and hours talking to them before going on to make the documents. That day I’m lucky. Two of the men are from Alsace, speak fluent German and even know the areas where they’re going to be parachuted in. It’s more complicated for the others because we have to start entirely from scratch.

  The meetings and conversations go on one after the other without pause throughout this long and exhausting day. It’s like this every time new agents pass through the CLD before taking the plunge. There’s so much to do you don’t notice time, you forget to eat. By the time I leave, night’s already falling and everyone’s gone home. A special meeting’s been arranged for this evening, and I have to hurry to get there. It’s a reunion with all my former comrades in the Resistance. So far my work’s left me so little spare time that I haven’t seen most of them.

  There’s lots of us there that evening, a good thirty in that cheap little cafeteria on Rue Claude-Bernard. All those from the 6th section laboratory are there: Giraffe, Ackerberg, Heron, Otter, Water Lily, Suzie, Herta and René Polski, Cachoud’s assistant. It’s good to see everyone again. Water Lily greets me warmly, gives me a glass of wine and talks about chemistry, which she’s decided to study. We chat for a moment when suddenly, in the middle of the general hubbub, there’s a laugh I recognize, a very familiar one, coming from the back of the room. I survey the room, and what do I see? A young man, tall, blond, pipe in his mouth and a steely look. No need for introductions, it’s Ernest Appenzeller accompanied by Henri Phohorylès and Jacques Lazarus, all three of whom were in Brunner’s last convoy! I co
uldn’t understand it. My first reaction was to wonder whether the wine had been spiked. It’s crazy, I think I’m seeing ghosts! Am I seeing things? Going mad? Is it the emotion or perhaps the post-traumatic shock everyone’s talking about? And the others, can they see them as well? There’s no one in the restaurant who looks surprised; everyone’s laughing, drinking, smoking and talking their heads off. I push my way through to them and, with a couple of roars of laughter and pats on the back, they tell me how they escaped. They had a few implements and with them they managed to saw through the bars over the window of the railroad car. And since the train, constantly halted by the sabotage of the Resistance, had only reached Saint-Quentin after four days, several of them escaped by night and got back to the capital with just a few minor injuries and empty stomachs. I haven’t seen Ernest since the day I refused to give him the address of the laboratory, but that matter is closed. He, who had so often come close to death, has once again escaped from Brunner’s claws. He’s alive, that’s the main thing. And, as you will see later on, Ernest and I were going to have a few missions to carry out together, in a different struggle.

  But let’s leave Ernest and concentrate for a moment on Pierre Mouchenik, called ‘Pierrot’, who I met for the first time at that party. Pierrot, twenty-five, was a former member of the Jewish Army who, after Maurice Cachoud left, had taken charge of the production of forged papers in Nice. The distance between Paris and Nice meant that during the war we couldn’t meet, but we had often corresponded in invisible ink. He was blond with blue eyes, a man who always seemed at ease. He had a gift for language, an enthusiasm that you got caught up in and, above all, that particular way of speaking to a crowd, looking each person in the eye so that everyone felt it concerned them personally. He was a virtuoso in the art of taking a breath and pausing, knew how to hold the suspense or to indulge in repartee. He always had a joke up his sleeve, an anecdote or a story that sounded like a novel. And his charm had a devastating effect on women. But, above all, he had a strong belief in liberty and equality. I took a liking to him from the moment he opened his lips. He was the one who came over to me and insisted I tell him what I’d been doing since the Liberation. Obviously I gave him the official version of my activities: lieutenant in the army. He seemed disappointed I wasn’t available, and it wasn’t long before I knew why.

  One week later the DGER was jumping for joy. We’d just heard that the Axis forces had capitulated. The missions of the agents we were keeping hidden were canceled, and my fabrication of German papers stopped abruptly. I was starting to destroy the documents when my boss, Colonel Pommès-Barrière, came to discuss a new urgent assignment with me. It wasn’t about forged papers anymore but a laborious cartographical task mapping Indo-China with a view to a potential recapture by the forces of the French administration of the colony. I complied without objection, an order was an order. But as the maps piled up beneath the lens of my reproduction camera, I was beset by a profound sense of inner conflict. I no longer felt I was in the right place. Military espionage in times of peace was no concern of mine, and I found the prospect of taking part in the colonial war that was on the horizon sickening, terrifying even. I’d never made a decision to be a forger. A soldier even less. What I’d done in the past I’d done because I had to; I’d had no choice. I knew that after the maps they were going to ask me to make forged documents for a war that had no justification in my eyes and that, like all wars, would have innocent victims. I wouldn’t be able to obey the orders that would come, not because I didn’t like them, but because my principles forbade it: if the insurrection of the Indo-Chinese was to take place, shouldn’t I see it as comparable to what the Resistance had been for the French?

  The word didn’t exist at the time, but I was deeply anti-colonialist. The next day I decided, despite the insistence of my superiors, who wanted to keep me, to resign. No sooner had Pierrot heard of this than he had people looking for me everywhere. It was Otter who found me several weeks later. I was living like a destitute in a tiny hovel on Rue de Charenton, with no water or electricity, trying to rebuild my life by getting enough little photographic commissions to keep me going.

  I saw Pierrot once, then again and again. Each time he was very excited, more and more impatient, a real live wire…

  When Pierrot appealed to me and explained that the aim of his group’s activities was to allow the survivors of the camps to immigrate into Palestine illegally, I at first refused. It was no use him using every possible argument and telling me that it was a matter of the future of several hundred thousand people, I remained adamant. I refused to start taking part in illegal activities again now the war was over.

  “What made you change your mind?”

  To convince me, Pierrot arranged for me to go with some GIs to the refugee camps in Germany. It was January 1946. There were four of us in the jeep. We’d crossed the German frontier an hour ago when one of them pointed to a an immense brick camp in the distance behind which was a collection of low, rectangular huts set in the middle of a muddy-looking field.

  Suddenly I saw them, on the other side of the barbed wire in prisoners’ striped costumes. There were hundreds coming slowly towards us with questioning looks. I’d known what to expect when I’d agreed to come on this trip, and I’d prepared myself for it but, faced with this throng of black-and-white costumes that amassed along the barbed wire in a few minutes, I caught myself thinking for a moment that I’d rather not get out of the jeep.

  I managed to talk to one of them who spoke fluent French. He was Polish, a former French teacher. He told me he’d have to be dead before he’d set foot in his old country again. They all said the same. The governments of their countries had betrayed them, being on European soil would always remind them of the atrocities they’d been subjected to. Nothing could break their determination, even if it meant staying in these camps to wait, or rot, for years if need be, until they could finally obtain a visa for Palestine. A certain solidarity had been established there. Families had been recreated—children had been born, adults had adopted children that weren’t theirs—which nothing apart from death could break up, the Pole said with a tender look at a woman sitting some way away with her baby, who I realized had become his new family.

  What most shocked me during that short trip was to find, on the way back, hordes of savage children prowling around near the camps.

  When we set off, it had been agreed that the GIs would take me to see several camps for displaced persons in the area, but one had been enough for me, and I asked to be taken straight back to Paris. Suddenly, as we rounded a bend, in the distance I saw slim silhouettes standing right in the middle of the road. There were at least fifteen of them, and their intention seemed to be to block our way. As we approached I realized, in the light of the headlamps, that they were children armed with sticks. They were no more than fourteen years old, some even very small, six or seven perhaps. The driver switched off the lights, slowed down but didn’t stop. I didn’t immediately understand why the GIs took out their guns and aimed them at the kids, who immediately drew back to the side, though without showing the least sign of fear. They left just a very narrow gap for us to pass through, and while I was looking at them, one hit my window violently with his fist uttering incomprehensible cries of abuse. To see such hatred and rage on a child’s face was so frightening it made my blood run cold. Even at the risk of injuring some of them, the driver had no choice but to accelerate to get the jeep free since it was once more surrounded. No sooner had we passed them than the children regrouped and attacked us from behind, throwing sticks and stones as the jeep disappeared into the darkness.

  One of the GIs explained that they were children who’d survived the concentration camps, from which they’d been liberated, and now roamed around them organized in outlaw gangs, attacking farms and houses to find food and terrorizing the local population. Their parents were dead, exterminated by the Nazis and, left to themselves, they showed extreme violence toward adults who
m they looked on as their enemies. The road we were driving along passed close to a camp of refugee orphans. They’d been sent there in their thousands, by force. When the liberators arrived, most were found surrounded by corpses; for months they’d had to fend for themselves to survive, and they didn’t trust anyone anymore. As we continued on our way, for twenty, thirty, forty kilometers we saw other gangs taking off across the ditches as the jeep passed.

  That trip brought back to me the shock of the Liberation. It was only when the occupying force had been driven out of the country that I experienced my first great disillusionment. I’d dreamed of victory—it was a hope I’d clung on to with all my might, and I’d been naïve enough to imagine it would bring in its wake the end of groups being despised, the end of racism. I was perplexed and horrified at the number of refugees no one had any idea what to do with. Palestine was still under the British mandate, and the White Paper was in force, restricting emigration there to a trickle while there were record numbers of visa applications, hundreds of thousands. The situation was dragging on and on.

  Everything was deadlocked.

  I felt strong empathy with these survivors of the concentration camps that no one wanted anything to do with, these children who didn’t believe in anything any longer and whose faith in the world needed to be restored, these men and women who longed for some far-off land where they could rebuild their lives, shielded from persecution. For once they wanted to be masters of their own fate. They wanted to emigrate to Palestine. Where they went was a matter of indifference to me—I wasn’t a Zionist—but I was strongly in favor of the idea that every individual, especially if they were persecuted and their life in danger, should have the right to move freely, to cross borders, to choose where their exile should take them.