31. The Forger Who Saved Thousands of Jews
French teenager Adolphe Kaminsky joined the Resistance after France’s defeat and subsequent occupation by the Nazis. He was a precocious and self-taught gifted chemist. He combined that with a talent for forgery to make himself perhaps Europe’s best underground forger. Adolphe specialized in identity papers, and forged documents that helped save the lives of thousands of Jews.
He 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, Adolphe dropped out of school at age thirteen and got a job working for dry cleaners. The 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 got a part time job working for a chemist on weekends. That knowledge and love of chemistry would come in handy during Adolphe’s subsequent career as a forger.