I was the last to join the laboratory of the 6th section, but as soon as I arrived I had to turn all their methods upside down. When Water Lily told me that she removed the Jew stamp with absorbent cotton soaked in ordinary correction fluid or bleach that had been boiled and then Suzie re-colored the card with crayons, I almost fainted. Their method was far too risky. I immediately explained that on contact with skin and sweat the writing would reappear in yellow a few days later. And if they didn’t neutralize the correction fluid with an alkaline substance, it would continue to eat away at the paper, and the area that had been treated would take on the texture of blotting paper. The identity card would be no use at all. They looked on dumbfounded as I demonstrated my own chemical solutions and showed them how they should go about it from then on. This was very easy for me. I had all this technical knowledge from my experience as a dyer and the hours I’d spent with an expert in the chemistry of milk. Thanks to my apprenticeship in dyeing, I knew how to dye a cotton thread without affecting the woolen thread. Moreover I’d started doing experiments in chemistry when I was fourteen, doing research into erasing so-called ‘indelible’ inks. Despite years of analyzing them I hadn’t found one that worked—you can delete them all.
I was amused by their enthusiastic response. Suzie talked of magic. A few days later Water Lily decided to devote herself to the convoys of children, convinced that the laboratory for forged papers had found its chemical engineer and would have no further need of her services.
That was only the beginning. Subsequently forging documents became more and more complicated, while at the same time the demand for forged papers was growing day by day. When I joined the network, the 6th section was already in close liaison with other Jewish networks, the Mouvement de jeunesse sioniste (MJS), the Organisation juive de combat (OJC), the free clinic in Rue Amelot and the Oeuvre de secours à l’enfance (OSE). Later other networks formed closer links with us; for example, the Mouvement de libération nationale (MLN) took its orders from London and cooperated with Combat, and Libération Nord, but also the communist networks—the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) and the Main-d’Oeuvre immigrée (MOI).4 The unified Resistance was getting organized. A web was being spun between the different networks, and each one used its special skills to combat the deportations and organize the maquis units.5 These interconnections made it possible to exchange crucial information. The Resistance, which until then had consisted of small, isolated initiatives and groups, was gradually acquiring a structure in which the separate units, like the tentacles of an octopus, were becoming interdependent. We became the most resourceful and effective laboratory in France, the only one to have large-scale production capacity, for by that time I’d found techniques that meant we no longer had to falsify existing documents but could produce new ones as genuine as if they came from the government printing office. I converted the paper myself to make it thicker and made my own ‘official’ rubber stamps.
Here I must add that I didn’t have just one lab at my disposal, but two. When Maurice Cachou, who was in charge of forged papers for the MLN, heard of my achievements, he contacted me directly to ask whether I could do photoengraving. At that time, to avoid lengthy journeys with their police checks, I’d left the Young Men’s Hostel and had taken a room in another boarding house in Rue Jacob, very close to the 6th’s laboratory. I made a pretense of being an amateur photographer, and the boarding-house cook, who’d become fond of me, let me have a room above mine that she kept empty, assuming I was using it for photographic experiments. In fact, it was there that I set up the MLN research laboratory for forged papers.
Another maid’s room, but this time one with an address that was absolutely secret, since I was the only person to have access to it. It was there that I converted the paper, at night, and where, thanks to photoengraving processes, I reproduced an endless stream of stamps, letterhead paper and watermarks. All the blank documents came from my Rue Jacob lab. Everything there was improvised, set up with materials salvaged from junk shops and bits and pieces. But by cobbling things together I managed to reproduce highly sophisticated machines, as good as those in real photoengraving studios. Since centrifugal force was the only effective way of spreading the photosensitive fluid on the plates, I invented a centrifuge made from a bicycle wheel. My pipe made an excellent tool for smoothing out documents impaired by acid substances. In fact that was all I used it for—I’ve never smoked. With converging and diverging lenses and a little semi-transparent mirror, I reproduced a machine used by Leonardo da Vinci that projected a virtual image of the drawing—or stamp—to be reproduced by hand, making a very precise line possible. That was all hand-crafted but very effective! And since I was constantly having to invent things, I spent a lot of sleepless nights.
Every morning, all I had to do was to take the blank documents to the 6th’s laboratory to be filled in; it was so close I didn’t have to use the metro.
Our services were made available to everyone. Orders poured in. In ever greater numbers. They came from Paris, from the UGIF, from the South Zone, from London. We had to maintain a rhythm of work that verged upon the unmanageable, sometimes up to five hundred documents a week.
In general it was Otter and I who liaised with those who passed on the orders. I remember that, like me, his appearance was naïve and innocent. It was our best cover. He was short, with sandy hair and freckles, a very small nose and an impish look. A babyish, juvenile look—an open sesame to every door. He was the one who was most often in contact with the Jewish networks; I with the MLN and the communists. But that could change, depending on emergencies. In general we arranged our rendezvous in some busy part of Paris, preferably with a woman. We would meet appearing to be lovers on a date. I always arrived first, each time carrying a rose. Then my ‘fiancée’ and I would ‘go for a walk’ together, making sure we exchanged affectionate glances whenever we felt we might be being observed. By the time we separated we both knew what we had to do.
That day my rendezvous wasn’t with one of my lady loves but with Marc Hamon, alias ‘Penguin’, the man who’d recruited me when I joined the Resistance; he too was a member of the EIF.
I knew that if Penguin was coming in person, it must be because his problem was so urgent that he couldn’t wait until one of the young women in the network was available. We were to meet in the Tuileries garden. When I arrived I found him sitting on a bench looking particularly tired and worried. I commented that he had lost weight since we first met, at which he laughed and returned the compliment. Then he started to speak in more serious tones.
“Yesterday Radio London gave us some good news. The German army is retreating on all fronts, and from now on we have all the armies of North Africa on our side. The problem is that the Nazis have decided to speed up the process of clearing out the Jews by preparing a huge roundup over the whole of the territory. In three days time, ten children’s homes across Paris are going to be raided simultaneously. I have a list for you. I need everything: ration cards, birth certificates, baptismal certificates, plus identity cards for the adults taking them across the border, their orders and the pass for the whole group.”
“How many?”
“How many children? … More than three hundred.”
Three hundred children. That meant more than nine hundred different documents to make. In three days! It was impossible. In general the requests came in bundles of thirty to fifty a day, sometimes a few more. It wasn’t the first big challenge I’d faced, but in this case the shock was almost too much for me. As I left Penguin, for the first time I was afraid I might fail. Up to that point I’d always managed, through my accumulation of miscellaneous knowledge, to find almost miraculous solutions to technical problems. The better the documents became, the more I’d needed to invent, to show ingenuity in forging the unforgeable with the limited means at my disposal. But this time it wasn’t solutions we needed, but quantity, and I knew that I’d reached the maximum productivity I was capable of already. The hours in a day can’t be condensed, and unfortunately they can’t be prolonged either. No time to think it over. First of all I had to run over to Rue Jacob to make paper: closely