When she was a student, Sarah tried to deceive her parents. She tried to forge her mother’s signature on a document informing them that she had received a bad grade in school. She understood this and got angry. However, her father did not scold her. She still remembers his booming laugh, her attempt seemed so amateurish to him. Decades later, he was able to interpret his unexpected reaction. Then she learned that her father, Adolfo Kaminsky, was a serious counterfeiter.

Its action began during the Second World War. As a teenager, Kaminsky, thanks to his perseverance and talent, helped save thousands of Jews in France. Until the early 1970s, he continued to produce falsified or outright fake documents, identity cards and passports for free, which were supplied to participants in anti-colonial and liberation movements around the world, as well as fighters against dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Hellas. .

“Whenever he faced a problem, he didn’t give up until he found a solution,” his daughter Sarah Kaminsky says in a phone call to K. “He made no distinction between people, between race, color or religion. Therefore, he continued to forge documents whenever dignity and freedom were at risk. He didn’t care if the recipients were in some distant country.”

On January 9, 2023, Adolfo Kaminsky died in Paris at the age of 97. “I admired his courage. He was a humble person in the background who rarely talked about the good things he did,” says his daughter. With her own help, and on the basis of what her father told her about writing his biography, “K” also synthesizes the Greek aspect of his activities, when during the dictatorship, various associations flocked to his authority and, with the help of forged documents, directed resistance. fighters in Athens. For about three months, the Greek, whose last name was not disclosed, studied with him in a secret workshop in Paris. Kaminsky was so impressed with his resourcefulness that he thought he would be a worthy replacement.

From an early age, Adolfo Kaminsky loved chemistry. “He was mostly self-taught,” notes his daughter. Working as a dyer and dry cleaner as a teenager, he learned how to remove even the toughest stains, and his apprenticeship on a dairy farm later helped him. Realizing the properties of lactic acid, he was now able to discolor ink from documents. At 18, he joined the French resistance. He forged documents with which Jewish families fled from concentration camps.

At some point, he was assigned a task that seemed impossible. Within days, he had to forge 900 birth and baptismal certificates and food stamps for 300 Jewish children. If they mislead the Nazis, they will buy valuable time for the children to run away to families in Switzerland or Spain. He worked day and night without stopping until he passed out. He tried to avoid the slightest technical error. He calculated that one hour of work is equivalent to creating 30 documents. “If I had slept one hour, 30 people would have died,” he said decades later. It is estimated that the network he was part of helped save more than 10,000 people during those years.

During the dictatorship, various associations appealed to his authority and sent resistance fighters to Athens with forged documents.

After the liberation of Paris, he worked with the French military secret service so that their agents could infiltrate Nazi Germany and collect evidence of the extermination camps. In later years, he continued to forge documents that ended up in Algeria, Angola and Guinea, Latin America, and even American deserters who wanted to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War.

His daughter Sarah describes in her book Adolfo Kaminsky: The Life of a Forger, her father’s connection to the struggle against the dictatorship in Greece. After the coup on April 21, 1967, he was asked to produce false documents for the Greeks. The first requests came from the Curiel network, which in those years supported various movements around the world. At one point, as he describes in the book, he was approached by a French psychiatrist who asked him for other fake Greek identities to take with him to Athens. He told him that the counterfeiter they had in Britain could no longer help them and they needed a new supplier. First, he made six fake IDs for her and sewed a secret pouch into her bag to take them to Athens.

“Greek ID cards were coated in softer gelatin than other documents. If you tried to remove it to change a photo or some details, the whole map fell apart. It was better to make a new map from scratch,” says Kaminsky in the book.

Some time later, through the mediation of the lawyer and politician Roland Dumas, Kaminsky met the Trotskyist Michalis Rapti, known as “Pablo”. In his book, he described how their brief meeting disturbed him. On the one hand, because he asked him for a fee, when it was known in illegal circles that he did not ask for money as a counterfeiter. He wanted, he said, to be independent and reduce the chances of being detected by the police. Also causing a stir was the fact that “Pablo” had previously been arrested in the Netherlands for counterfeiting money, as well as his so obvious political activities. He preferred not to cooperate, did not want to attract attention.

Sarah Kaminsky recalls that numerous counterfeiting students lined up to her father, trying to learn the secrets of his craft. One of them, he says, was a Greek. He was a student in Paris and worked briefly as a production designer. He spent about three months next to him, until at some point he returned to Greece. “She gave him a box of stamps and ink he needed to continue working in the country,” says Sarah.

Her father stopped producing forged documents in the early 1970s when he feared his activities might be exposed. He worked as a photographer and, decades later, told his children about everything. The daughter still keeps his tools, as well as old fake documents from different countries. Some are semi-finished, others have never been used because they had minor flaws. “I don’t know why he kept them,” he comments. “Perhaps because, deep down, he wanted to tell his story one day.”