Adolfo Kaminsky
Adolfo Kaminsky was a French teenager who joined the Resistance after France’s defeat in 1940 and subsequent occupation by the Nazis. He was a precocious and self-taught gifted chemist, which he combined with a talent for forgery to make himself perhaps Europe’s best underground forger. He specialized in identity papers, and forged documents that helped save the lives of thousands of Jews.
Adolfo was born in 1925 to Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated to Argentina, before the family relocated to France in 1932. To help support his family, he dropped out of school at age 13 and got a job working for dry cleaner. His work entailed the use of various compounds, which led to a familiarity with, and subsequent passion for, chemistry. He started reading up on chemistry, and took a part-time job working for a chemist on the weekend. That knowledge and love of chemistry would come in handy during his subsequent career as a forger.
He was 15 years old when France fell to the Germans in 1940, and it did not take long before Adolfo and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. First, his home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and his family was evicted. The following year, the Nazis shot Adlofo’s mother dead. In 1943, his family was rounded up and interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz, and were only spared after intervention from the Argentinean consul.
In the meantime, Adolfo had joined the French Resistance at age 16. Sent by his father to pick up forged identity papers from a Resistance cell, he discovered that they faced difficulties removing a particular dye. The precocious chemist gave them a solution off the top of his head that immediately solved their problem. Impressed, the Resistance recruited him and put him to work in an underground laboratory in Paris. There, he spent the rest of the war forging identity papers for those on the run from the Nazis and in need of fake ID, particularly Jews. By war’s end, he had produced fake documents that helped save over 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children, from the horrors of the Holocaust.
After the war, Adolfo Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. However, he also continued his clandestine work as a master forger, lending his talents to disadvantaged peoples and liberation causes around the world. He created documents for thousands of freedom fighters, such as the Algerian FLN, refugees, exiles, and pacifists. As the Jerusalem Post summed his career: “He grew to be a humanist forger, a utopian outlaw, the Robin Hood of false papers, preparing passports and identity cards for the world’s oppressed.”