30. Forging for the Resistance
Adolphe Kaminsky was fifteen when France fell to the Germans in 1940. It did not take long before he and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. First, Adolphe’s home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and his family was evicted. The following year, the Nazis shot his mother dead. In 1943, Adolphe’s family was rounded up and interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only saved by a last-minute intervention from the Argentinean consul.
In the meantime, Adolphe had joined the French Resistance at age sixteen. 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 Adolphe 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 IDs, particularly Jews.