12. A Display of Chemistry Skill Set This Teenager on a Forgery Career
When Germany conquered France in 1940, Adolphe Kaminsky was fifteen-years-old. It did not take long before he and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. The Kaminsky home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and the Kaminskys were evicted. The following year, the Nazis shot Adolphe’s mother dead, without the teenager being able to do anything to save her. In 1943, his family was interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only spared after intervention from the Argentinean consul.
By then, 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 had trouble 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.