Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life
BY Sarah Kaminsky
PHOTOGRAPHS © Adolfo Kaminsky
TRANSLATED BY Mike Mitchell
DoppelHouse Press © 2016
Adolfo Kaminsky, une vie de faussaire by Sarah Kaminsky © Calmann-Lévy, 2009
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français.
This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Français.
DESIGNED BY Curt Carpenter
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
NAMES: Kaminsky, Sarah, 1979-, author. | Kaminsky, Adolfo, 1925-, photographer. Mitchell, Mike (Translator).
TITLE: Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life/by Sarah Kaminsky; photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky; translation by Mike Mitchell.
DESCRIPTION: Los Angeles, CA: DoppelHouse Press, 2016.
IDENTIFIERS: ISBN 978-0-9970034-4-4 (ebook) | LCCN 2016947348.
SUBJECTS: LCSH Kaminsky, Adolfo, 1925- | Forgers---France--History. | World War, 1939-1945--Underground movements. | Forgery--History. | World War, 1939-1945--Jewish resistance--France. | Palestine--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century. | Algeria--History--Revolution, 1954-1962.
BISAC BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC D802.F8 K36 2016 | DDC 940.53/44--dc23
DoppelHouse Press
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
For Leïla
Preface
WHEN I WAS LITTLE I knew nothing about the story of my father’s life. I was the youngest of three children. As far as I could see, I had a father like everyone else’s, who always taught me to obey the law. At home he never talked about his earlier life, when he’d been a forger. There was one episode, however, that should have made me think. One day I got a poor grade at school. I was absolutely determined to conceal it from my parents. I decided to forge my mother’s signature; I’d never have dared to try and copy my father’s, it’s absolutely impossible to forge. I practiced for a long time on draft paper before setting about it carefully. Later on my mother happened to come across my notebook and immediately realized that the signature was forged. I really got yelled at. Ashamed of myself, I took refuge in my bed. When my father arrived home from work, he came to my bedroom. Expecting the worst, to be hauled over the coals as never before, I hid under the blankets. He sat down on the side of the bed, my notebook in his hand, and simply burst out laughing. He laughed so much he couldn’t stop. Puzzled, I poked my head out of the sheets. Looking at me with a big smile on his face, he declared, “But at least you could have made it a better one, Sarah. Look at this signature, how tiny it is!” Then he went away, laughing uproariously.
I couldn’t say precisely when I knew. There was never a family gathering at which our father announced, “Children I have something important to tell you.” It just happened as time passed. When I was very young, I liked to keep my ears pricked to hear what the grown-ups were talking about. I heard it said that he’d been in the Second World War, the Algerian War. But to my little girl’s mind, ‘being in the war’ meant to be a soldier. I found it difficult to imagine my father, a pacifist and non-violent, with a helmet and rifle. Later on, books were published in which his name was mentioned; then there were documentaries in which he agreed to speak. Eventually, once I was grown-up, I naively thought I knew more or less everything there was to know. I couldn’t imagine it would take me several years to gather together and compile all the elements of his biography. There were so many memories to be called up, people to be found, places to be visited.
A lot of travel was needed to find my father’s former comrades. The ones I wanted to question were scattered all over the world. One was in Portugal, another in Algeria, yet others in Israel, in Switzerland, in Italy, in the United States, in Latin America… Some were missing, already deceased. It was a matter of urgency to collect as many accounts as possible before there were no more witnesses left. I realized that time had suddenly started to fly. My father was no longer young; he was about to celebrate his seventy-eighth birthday. I was twenty-four, and I’d just had my son, Alec. All this triggered something in my mind: for the first time I realized my father wasn’t immortal. The birth of Alec brought its share of joy and wonder, but also this fear: was Alec going to have the time to get to know his grandfather? If that didn’t happen, would it be up to me to tell him the story of that remarkable life?
Alec was babbling away in his stroller when I walked to my father’s to ask him if he would like me to write the book. He gave his approval immediately. When I was back home, he called me. There was one question bothering him. “Sarah, do you know if there’s a statute of limitation?” It was the first thing he wanted to know: did he still risk going to prison, despite the thousands of lives he’d saved? For every time he’d gone to the aid of an oppressed people, he had been breaking the law. At best he risked being sent to prison for his commitment to these causes, at worst condemned to death, and that explains why it took so many years for him to agree to reveal his secrets.
We arranged to see each other every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. I warned him, “You’ll have to answer all my questions, even those that will take you back to past events that are painful. Are you really sure you want to share all that with me?” He agreed enthusiastically. However, the first session turned out to be a disaster. Concerned not to lose the least detail of our conversation, I’d brought a Dictaphone. As soon as I turned it on, my father’s voice was transformed. It became hesitant, too low, almost inaudible. He answered my questions with stock replies or a simple “Yes,” “No,” “It wasn’t quite like that,” or mere grunts. At the end of the day I had no usable information. I told myself we’d never get there. At the next session I decided not to turn on the Dictaphone. And, as if by magic, it loosened his tongue, his normal voice returned. I realized that the Dictaphone, that simple, inoffensive mike, unwittingly suggested to him the idea of a police interrogation. As if in his eyes I’d become a Gestapo officer. Putting technology to one side, I went out and bought some school notebooks, in which I would record our conversations during a whole year of interviews. Little by little our relationship changed from father and daughter to that of confidants.
What struck me most in the course of our discussions was his feeling of being responsible for the lives of others and guilt at having survived. They are feelings he has retained throughout his life and which doubtless explains why he continued to forge papers for thirty long years, at the cost of all sorts of sacrifices. For sacrifices there were, and many of them. Financial sacrifices for, in order not to be a ‘mercenary’, he always refused payment for his forged papers, with the result that he was always broke; sacrifices in his relationships, for his double life caused many break-ups—his repeated unexplained absences made his partners think he wasn’t truly involved or was even being unfaithful, and eventually left him; family sacrifices, since long before he married my mother, Leïla, he had two grown-up children by an earlier marriage… I was very little and had just arrived in France when my father introduced me to my half-sister and half-brother. Unfortunately he hadn’t been able to bring up these earlier children, who were thirty years older than me, the way he would have liked. My sister told me that he once disappeared for two years without sending any news, nor even saying goodbye. They often thought he was dead, sometimes that they’d been abandoned. They had no idea that his long silence was aimed at protecting them. Now I could better understand why my father didn’t really like talking about the past. And I realized how fortunate I had been to have a dad, a dad who was there.
The book, the culmination of many years of work,