Adolfo Kaminsky Read online

  No sooner had I gotten back to Paris than I picked up the phone and dialed Pierrot who, as I was well aware, was itching for me to call.

  1. Center of Liaison and Documentation; General Directorate for Study and Research; Ministry of Prisoners of War and Deportees. [MM]

  6

  IT’S LONG BEEN PITCH DARK. It’s October 1947 now. I’ve covered the windows with heavy-duty black paper to keep me out of sight of inquisitive neighbors, so they don’t start wondering about the light that’s almost never off. Prudence is ever my watchword.

  Ernest’s order had been ready for ages: passport, driver’s license and courier’s ID for him and two of his men. On the other hand, I know I’m unlikely to be satisfied with the result of a collective Brazilian visa demanded by a ‘Monsieur Pol’, the broad rubber stamp that has to be used to get three hundred applicants for the journey to Palestine to the port. I have a problem with the one they’ve given me as a model. The letters are too flattened on one side and the ink runs, leaving blots. Is it that the original has traps, deliberate design faults? Should I rectify them or not at all? If at least I had two different models, as I always insist on, I’d be able to compare them and know where to make a few corrections. After a long analysis by microscope, I have no choice but to proceed from experience. I decide to reduce the blots, though without removing them entirely, but to hardly correct the squashed letters at all. I make a negative of the model, then a relief photoengraving that I mold in rubber by heating in order to obtain a negative proof of the stamp. In general, I heat the ordinary stamps by using a vulcanizer—available in stores, which is used to repair bicycle inner tubes—but in this case, for a much larger visa stamp, I resort to my good old method: the clothes iron. I always have the most recent models without, for all that, ever having ironed anything. I’ve just acquired one of the first electric irons designed for household use. It doesn’t have a thermostat, but I’m so accustomed to using them that I just have to hold the iron a few centimeters away from my face to be able to estimate the temperature more or less to the last degree. As it cools, the negative stamp hardens, allowing me to make the positive. Then I go on to analyze the ink of the original before mixing my colors to achieve an exact replica, a vermilion red. As far as the precise tint is concerned, I don’t have any particular difficulty but, after verification by artificial light, by infrared and ultraviolet rays, I discover two traps that are set to identify forgeries: the ink contains a substance that adds extra brilliance and a phosphorescent substance that doesn’t show up in the ultraviolet rays. As far as the brilliance is concerned, I fortunately have the experience of my work for the Resistance and the DGER—I know I’ll be able to reproduce it by adding some gum arabic, but I still need to do a few trials to find the right amount. As for the phosphorescence of the ink, there are some kinds that are revealed or not according to the speed of the light and there again, I have to seek, think and test.

  Some hours later, I can finally check the result and compare the two stamps. I’ve reduced the blots and the flattened letters nicely, but I’m just not satisfied with my forged rubber stamp. Now it’s too sharp, too perfect compared with the original to be real. If in doubt, it’s best to start all over again.

  “Who exactly are you working for?”

  From then on I was working for the Aliyah Bet,1 the clandestine network for the immigration of concentration camp survivors to Palestine. I was working with most of those who had made up the Nice network, who now formed the French branch of the Haganah,2 and, as always, they expected me to perform miracles, more miracles than could be demanded of a single man.

  When I got back from Germany, Pierre introduced me—in a town house on Avenue Kléber that looked like the embassy of a clandestine government—to Abraham Polonski, the man called ‘M. Pol’, the creator of the Jewish Army, to which all those of the South Zone group had taken the oath. He was short but impressive with his broad shoulders and leader’s air. Commanding troops came naturally to him, and his authority as a war leader had brought him the nickname ‘Little Napoleon’.

  There were serious political differences at the heart of the organization, but since we were all pursuing the same goal, we were able to put our disagreements to one side in order to combine our forces. Nevertheless, like me, my closest friends tended to follow the pre-war Russian line: Marxist, defending the idea of collective labor and of the kibbutz. We each had our personal motivation for taking part in this illegal immigration. For Pierrot, for example, it was the future of the young people that was most important. He wanted to help them reintegrate into society. His work therefore included the creation of school farms for adolescents and bringing together families that had been broken up. There was always a social side to his activities that was to become his vocation later on. Others, like M. Pol and his adjutant were following the idea of the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, as stipulated by the Balfour Declaration,3 a dream all Zionists clung to. Then there were those for whom helping the survivors to go to Palestine was the logical continuation of the Resistance. They had taken the oath to the Jewish Army. The great majority wanted to go and live there as soon as a political solution made it possible. But as far as I was concerned, it was above all the free movement of people of all nations that was at stake, perhaps because of my childhood, or something I’d inherited from my family, the years of forced exile my parents had had to endure. And then I had this painful memory of our first attempt to immigrate to France. I was only five at the time. After spending a month on the ship that took us from Buenos Aires to Marseilles, we were expelled only a few days after our arrival and forced to take refuge in Turkey, where we hoped to obtain permits. It was a long wait, two years during which we had to survive in abject poverty. And the birth of my little sister put a new obstacle in the way of our application. Since she hadn’t been born in Argentina, the Argentine government refused to grant her nationality. As for the Turkish authorities, they objected to her naturalization because she hadn’t been ‘conceived’ in Turkey. She was in a legal vacuum, and that prevented us from returning to France. It was then that I really understood the signification of the word ‘papers’, those indispensable documents that allow you to move legally from one state to another, the acquisition of which, for a family like mine that had spent decades wandering from one exile to another, proved particularly complicated. If I’m making a point of telling you stories from my childhood, it’s because it was there, in Turkey, that I became aware of two fundamental things that governed and conditioned most of the acts of resistance in my life. The first is the power of money and the injustices it causes, and the second is that without papers one is condemned to immobility.

  Let’s go back to where we left off. From now on my contacts in the Haganah were M. Pol, his assistant, Pierrot, or Ernest, who, as always, dealt with dangerous missions. The mission for most of the agents in the network was to coordinate operations from escaping from the camps to embarking at the ports. The camps were in Germany, Austria and Poland. You don’t empty a camp in one go. They had to get the displaced persons out in groups of thirty, in covered trucks, taking a few from each camp until they had a total of five hundred survivors per boat. The Aliyah units were secretly infiltrated into the camps and worked together with the Service d’évacuation et de regroupement des enfants et familles (SERE),4 a state-registered organization that gave us official government cover.

  I had to provide forged collective visas for the escapees. A single tourist visa could be used for thirty to fifty people, sometimes even a hundred depending on circumstances. The nationality of the papers depended on the language spoken by the group of survivors. And the names on the lists I made for the visa were invented, totally fictitious. Every person in the group was informed of their false name at the last moment, immediately before they left. It was very complicated. The White Paper still forbade any immigration at all, and it was absolutely essential that our groups should not arouse the suspicions of the Briti
sh intelligence service, which was why the movements of the immigrants should take the form of children’s summer camps or tours for groups of adults. The final destination never appeared on the documents. And since the convoys would have been systematically detected if everyone came from the same place, I also had to make a pile of papers supporting a fictitious place of origin, such as train tickets or customs stamps from different countries.

  I had also to provide forged documents for all the couriers and those who organized the escapes, who went all over Europe. For them I made something of everything: driving licenses, passports, visas, for they drove the refugees in trucks and had to cross borders. And of course there were also the members of the crews of the ships, not to mention the authorizations for mooring in the ports where they took on their human cargo. In most cases the passengers were officially embarking for a Latin American country, and it was only once they were out at sea that they changed course and headed for the coast of Palestine. But I knew that very few of the boats reached the right port. As soon as they entered British territorial waters off Palestine, British warships barred their way and escorted them to Cyprus, where the illegal immigrants were once more placed in camps for displaced persons, waiting for visas that never came. But even Cyprus was better than nothing: it wasn’t Germany or Poland, and the concentration camp survivors were closer to their hoped-for destination.

  On joining the organization I was very quickly handicapped by the insecure conditions where I was living in Rue Charenton. They provided me with new premises—2, Rue d’Écosse, near the Panthéon—in which I immediately installed all my equipment, the same as I’d had for the 6th section and the secret service, improved by a few items I’d recovered from old laboratories of the Resistance. Now I had a large, clean room at my disposal with running water, gas and electricity. There was a financial section through which one could get access to funds to meet urgent situations, I don’t know exactly how, it wasn’t my business. I’ve always hated dealing with money. All I know is that Pierrot had set up two export-import firms, bogus companies that allowed the organization to pay me a small salary to compensate me for my expenses, but also so that I could eat in cheap cafeterias, for I was the only one who didn’t get a ration card.

  However unlikely it may seem to you, after everything I’d done, especially for the army, I was underground again, therefore paid in cash and my name didn’t appear on any official register. After I left the secret service I had, however, set about trying to obtain my papers. All that I had was an out-of-date army ID card and a receipt from the prefecture with ‘Jew’ stamped diagonally across it. The police weren’t used to seeing that type of document any more. The Liberation had been over for a year, and everyone had gotten their personal situation sorted out ages ago. Not me. The inspector who interviewed me thought I was a suspicious character. “Illegal,” he said, “unless you can’t show us your Argentine papers by the end of the month.” I did finally manage to get my Argentine papers, but for a residence permit I had to provide proof of permanent employment, which I didn’t have. My papers were stamped by the section in charge of deportation, and I had to come back within two weeks with all the proofs and documents required, otherwise I’d be on a ship back to Argentina.

  That simple prefecture stamp sent me back to all the complicated paperwork my parents had had to submit to the authorities regularly to renew our residence permits when I was a child, with the constant fear of being expelled again and having to go into exile once more. At the time, I’d found all these supporting documents exhausting, all the proofs, the requests for extensions. But this time I took the threat of expulsion as a humiliation. I was indignant that the administration would have the power to throw me out when I’d worked for the Liberation and the reputation of a country where I believed I belonged.

  Also, when I joined the Aliyah Bet, the first document I forged was for myself; as it had been when I’d joined the 6th section and the DGER, it was a kind of ritual. To return to my work as a forger hadn’t been an easy decision. I remembered my first forgery. At that time there was no question that my activity was morally justified. We had to break the law. But did that mean I’d tumbled irredeemably into illegality? I’d always made sure that my knowledge and technical skill were solely used in the service of legitimate causes. I’d always made sure I never compromised with my sense of ethics, of morality. But once more I was outside the law, and I wondered whether, from the day I’d done my first forgery, I hadn’t been caught up in a spiral I’d have difficulty getting out of my whole life through.

  That morning Ernest arrived at the laboratory to collect his papers lugging an enormous suitcase and a large canvas bag containing weapons. A machine gun, a Sten submachine gun, a revolver, a large quantity of cartridges, clips for the Sten, plastic and detonators that he wanted me to keep until they were needed. Needed for what? I never found out. Ernest had retained his arrogance from the war years. His work was always terribly efficient, and no one could doubt his extreme loyalty, but he remained unpredictable.

  Impossible to know what he was cooking up, and he always seemed to be preparing several things at the same time. The two of us had gotten into the habit of never asking each other questions about our respective missions. I didn’t protest about the suitcase. I hadn’t had a wink of sleep during the night and, just having managed to solve the thorny problem of the Brazilian visa, I was in a hurry to get some breakfast before going to deliver it to M. Pol.

  We went to a café for a quick bite, and he accompanied me to the Haganah offices. M. Pol saw us separately and gave each of us new instructions. I left with a Madagascar visa, documents for a captain and boarding passes for the next day. No time for a rest. And it had been like that since the failure of the Exodus.

  The Exodus was an attempt, organized by the Haganah for the Alyah Bet, to break the blockade. It was an American ship transporting survivors of the concentration camps, not in their hundreds but, for the first time, in their thousands. A record number of five thousand had arrived clandestinely in France and embarked at Port-de-Bouc in the south, determined to force a way through the blockade at all cost and not to accept being diverted to Cyprus.

  When we heard that Exodus had failed and that the passengers were going to be brought back by force in British prison ships to their point of departure, all the members of the organization accompanied by numerous sympathizers hurried off to the quiet little village of Port-de-Bouc. I was one of them.

  It was a scorching summer. It was hot and dry. The town, suddenly flooded with people, was in slow motion. We filled the beaches and the narrow streets, meeting friends and EIF comrades at every crossroads. We were watching for the ships to appear in the distance. The port was besieged by journalists. By the police as well. We were all waiting. The days passed, always the same. The beach, demonstrations, taking a stroll, then starting all over again. Almost a vacation compared with the solitude and darkness of my laboratory. All my friends were there. It was by watching them, as at ease in the water as on the sand, athletic bodies, suntanned, that I became aware of how different I was. At twenty-one I couldn’t even swim, and I hadn’t seen the sea since a summer camp at Berck-Plage—when I was eight. Fly a plane, on the other hand, I could do that, I’d been trained as a pilot by the Haganah. Copy any document perfectly, make explosives, find a solution to any technical difficulty, I could do that too, but seeing them enjoying themselves, I realized that I’d been deprived of life for four years.

  On the beach, in the café, at the hotel, we talked everywhere and all the time about the future state, and we wanted it to be created in the image of the fraternity we could see in Port-Bouc; we would be the ones who built it, we’d make it a model of liberty and equality, and already we couldn’t wait to get there. Until then, Zionist ideology hadn’t meant anything to me, but I’d gradually come to believe in the possibility of a state where Jews could live without being persecuted; if they were always being thrown out of wherever they were, perhap
s they needed somewhere else where they’d legitimately belong, where the law and public opinion would protect every individual without distinction of race, country of origin, nationality or faith. This country had to be built, even if it was only to heal the wounds of hundreds of years of persecution. We all wanted to believe that the Exodus would be our last fight before victory. This event had sown diplomatic discord between Britain and France, which was refusing to compel the would-be emigrants to disembark. They must have been very unhappy in London. In the displaced-persons camps throughout Europe a hundred and forty thousand survivors had started a hunger strike in solidarity, making headlines in the press, and at last public opinion seemed sympathetic to our cause. I was confident. Britain would end up giving way.

  With our comrades we were on the alert. We were strong, we would stand together. We could make history. Together we were going to create something that would last—it was exhilarating, thrilling. Yes, there certainly was something historic happening there.

  But at the end of a week we had to face facts. Nothing was happening. The situation could go on for a long time while there were still a number of ships to send on their way. The time on the beach with its great hopes was over. The new directive from the organization was as follows: work with the Aliyah Bet by doubling the number of ships, giving priority to those who had been through this ordeal. For me that meant twice as much work. For the organization the idea was to fill the camps in Cyprus to overflowing, thus continuing to destabilize London.