The “Paris counterfeiter”, which made it possible to save thousands of deportation Jews by falsifying identity papers, died on Monday in Paris at the age of 97.
by Antoine Flandrin and Amaury da Cunha
During the Second World War, Parisian police tracked up resistance fighters specializing in the manufacture of false papers. It was only necessary that one day in 1944, during a control, they did not attract Adolfo Kaminsky, 18 -year -old, who transported in his bag fifty identity cards, his pen, his ink, his ink Tampons and its staple. “Do you want to see my snack?” He replied to the police, who let him leave. Relentless manufacturer of false documents, false wedding certificates, false baptism certificates, false food cards, the one who was nicknamed “the Paris fork” made it possible to save thousands of Jewish children from the deportation. He died on Monday January 9 in Paris, at the age of 97.
Adolfo Kaminsky was born on the 1 er 1925 in Buenos Aires, of Russian Jewish parents refugees in Argentina, who had long sought to settle in France. After fled the Tsarist pogroms, they had emigrated the first time in France at the beginning of the century. But considered as “reds”, they were expelled after the Russian revolution of 1917. Their second attempt to settle in France ended in a new expulsion. Leaving from Argentina, the Kaminsky arrive in Marseille from where they are redirected to Turkey. Adolfo Kaminsky is only a child, but he will not forget this wandering in total destitution on the banks of the Bosphorus. It is there that he understands that, undocumented, the refugees are condemned to a ghostly existence.
His family finally managed to settle in Paris in 1932, then in Vire, in Calvados, in 1938. After the primary study certificate, he began to work in the printing, then the dyeing, to meet to the needs of his family. Passionate about the magic of dyes, he is hired as assistant to a chemical engineer.
The experience runs short. His family was arrested on October 22, 1943 by the Germans. Interned at the Maladrery prison in Caen, the Kaminsky are transferred to Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis). They were released in January 1944, thanks to the intervention of the Consulate of Argentina. “I knew what was waiting for those who were going to be deported,” he will explain in a thirteen-minute documentary produced by the New York Times, entitled the forger (” the forger “, 2016).
in the service of many causes
At freedom, but in danger, he comes into contact with a group of resistance fighters to obtain false papers. His interlocutors immediately recruits him for his discoloration skills of inks. Under the pseudonym of Julien Keller, he works in a clandestine laboratory which makes false identity papers allowing many Jews to escape persecution.
You have 52.94% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.