He wields a thin needle with surgical precision even now, at 82 years old. It shows how he dipped it in ink, and then tried to copy the seal with successive small strokes, as if carved from a bird. “It was so, so, so, so, so, so,” he says. It was hard work, no doubt. “I’m impatient, I can’t fix this. How did I do it then? wonder about Nikos P. how does it represent his old art when he lived in Paris and did fake passports for the Greeks who fought against her dictatorship.

Our meeting took place on the occasion of the death of his teacher, a notorious counterfeiter. Adolfo Kaminsky. On January 9, 2023, Kaminsky died in Paris at the age of 97. His daughter Sarah recently spoke about her his story in “K”. She talked about how her father helped save thousands of Jews during World War II, and how his counterfeiting helped anti-colonial and anti-fascist activists around the world in subsequent decades, as well as the Greek resistance to the junta. She also talked about her father’s Greek student who served in his secret laboratory and stood out for his talent.

Looking through her father’s files, Sarah Kaminsky was able to find a phone number in Athens and put us in touch with this student.

No name needed

Even if half a century has passed since then, Nikos P. wants his full name not to be revealed publicly. He is tall, with a warm handshake. He lights the gas stove and we sit in the narrow kitchen of his Chalandri mansion. This is the first time he talks about this aspect of his past. In addition, as he explains, even in those years in Paris, few people knew what he was doing.

“Every person has talents that nature has given him and skills that he has developed on his own,” he says. “I had a passion for music and, I don’t know why, for geometry.” He describes the path that brought him to Paris. He wanted to study architecture, but he failed the exams for Greek universities. He then tried it in Grenoble, France where he stayed for two years before returning to Athens in 1961 to finally study set design at the Doxiadis School.

“Then I wanted to go to Paris and work at the opera,” he says. So in 1963 he returned to France and turned, as he relates, to Lila de Nobili, a well-known set and costume designer, who, however, did not include him in her team. 21 April 1967 coup found it in Paris.

After the coup, police officers appeared at his relatives’ house in Athens and persistently asked about him. Another student of the Doxiadis school called him a leftist.

He first welcomed the other Greek exiles by giving them shelter. “In the Greek district of Paris, we said that this was not for long, that the junta would soon fall. We expected to return home in a year or two. Then we realized that the dictatorship had strong gangs, “fatherland, religion, family,” as Papadopoulos said,” he says.

Then it became necessary to help the resistance fighters in another way. He was introduced to Kaminsky by a French psychologist who worked in advertising. He had a workshop in the basement. As soon as she met him, she asked if he could draw and what kind of research he did. At first, Kaminsky’s numerous questions put Nikos P.

He learned that after the coup, policemen appeared at the house of his relatives in Athens and persistently asked about him. Some other student Doxiadis school gave him away as a leftist. But Kaminsky was also suspicious, he tried to protect his back and not reveal his deed. Perhaps he lacked the good advice of Nikos P. and wanted to test the honesty of the Greek student’s answers for himself.

Nikos P. says he worked with an experienced counterfeiter for about a year before becoming independent. He remembers that he experimented for a long time with samples that were not going to be used, until one day Kaminsky asked him to make a Spanish impression. It was for the passport of a resistance fighter who would try to infiltrate Spain Dictator Franco. Then for the first time he felt a sense of responsibility, there should not have been a flaw in the document that he was about to hand over.

To keep production running, they purchased new genuine passports and then made changes to them. They say that once he was sitting in a cafe, and the visitor forgot his jacket. Before handing it over, he took out his passport. A few days later, he found the owner’s details and contacted him. “I called him and said, ‘I took your passport because we are from a country that needs it. He told me not to worry, he would produce more,” she says.

double jelly

He describes how difficult it was to remove the double gelatin from the passports they forged, how they had to painstakingly remove the photo of the real owner in order to replace it. From the Greek intermediary who brought him new “orders”, he always asked for “clean” photographs, without objects in the background. “Tell them to go out on a white wall, not even a light, just a photo,” he demanded. In vain.

He and Kaminsky tried to clean up the images they were given by placing white paper around the outline of the face and then photographing them again. He stopped forging in 1974, with the fall of the junta. Returning to Greece a year later, he noticed a familiar place in the house where he was invited. “Did you run away from anyone in France?” he asked the owners. He recognized the bars of the house from a photo he had edited. “I am happy because I have helped many people,” he says. “Don’t ask me how many paperwork I did, I didn’t keep track.”