When, after having left Penguin, I reach the laboratory, out of breath and clutching my case of documents to be filled out, I find Otter, Suzie and Herta there waiting, faithful to their post. But I’m astonished to see that Water Lily’s with them. It’s rare to find her at the laboratory now that she’s taken up other duties. They all look at me, devastated. As far as the three hundred children are concerned, they tell me that they’ve been informed already, which explains the presence of Water Lily, who’s come to give us a hand. But, beyond that, Otter has just received an order from the MOI, which needs papers for its Hungarian unit. They look at me questioningly. What they want to know is: does the lab really have the capacity to meet the challenge?
I put the cardboard boxes with blank documents down on the table and, in the tone the situation demands, give the signal.
“The children come first!” Water Lily adds.
Immediately the lab’s a hive of activity: Water Lily at the guillotine to trim boards for the cards, Suzie coloring in, Herta filling out, by hand and by typewriter. Only Otter, who usually never joins in the production of the cards but looks after all the administrative details, is going around and around like a lost soul.
“If you want to help, you can start stamping and signing the documents.”
He gets to work at once, while I make the papers look older using a machine I made myself: I insert some dust and pencil lead, then turn the handle to make them look dirty and worn, so that they don’t look too new or as if they’ve just come from the printer’s. The room is gradually pervaded by the smell of the chemicals mingled with that of sweat. Left, right and center we’re trimming, cutting out, stamping, coloring, typing, slaving away in our makeshift document factory. Then we stuff the backs of the mirrors and the false-bottomed drawers full of forged papers. Deep down inside we all know that we haven’t much chance of getting there, but we take care not to say it. Everything depends on our will-power. After all, the only thing we have is optimism, our only means of making progress.
When it gets dark and we all go home, I head off to my other laboratory, the one on Rue Jacob. How could I sleep when, in a whole day and with the help of Water Lily and Otter’s unexpected contribution, we haven’t finished a quarter of the papers for the children? What I can’t bear is the thought that at this rate we might perhaps manage to fulfill the order of papers for the children, but only at the sacrifice of the Hungarians.
Stay awake. For as long as possible. Fight against sleep. It’s a simple calculation: in one hour I can make thirty blank documents; if I sleep for an hour, thirty people will die…
After two nights of work—interminable, painstaking work, my eye stuck to the microscope—it’s exhaustion that’s my worst enemy. I have to hold my breath; forging papers is a meticulous task—your hand mustn’t tremble at all. Truly delicate work. Most of all I dread a technical mistake, a little slip, an infinitesimal detail that might escape me. Just a momentary lapse of concentration can be fatal, and the life or death of a human being hangs on every document. I check and recheck every sheet. They’re perfect. But the doubt remains. I check them again. The stress has gone, but what is worse, I’m literally nodding off. I get to my feet vigorously to wake myself up, take a few steps, slap myself several times. Then I sit down again. One hour equals thirty lives! I don’t have the right to give up. I blink and squint my eyes to clear my vision. Is it my printing that’s blurred or my eyes that can’t see anymore in the dimness of the darkroom?
The next day the lab in the Rue des Saints-Pères is seething with excitement.
We’re approaching the finishing line. At five this afternoon Otter and Water Lily will go off with our finished articles, all that we’ve had the time to make, the fruit of three days’ unremitting labor. This morning we’ve gotten to more than eight hundred finished documents, and I’m finally starting to feel confident. By always repeating the same movements, furiously, like robots, we’re working faster than ever, deftly and without respite. Our clothes are greasy and stink of chemicals, we’re dripping with sweat, but there is something new in the air on this day, something intangible in the atmosphere. Euphoria! We count out loud to encourage ourselves: 810, 811, 812… carried along by the rhythmical music of the incessant tap-tap of the typewriters, the smack of the guillotine, the thump of the stamps, the click of the stapler and the rumble of the machine that makes the paper look older.
Intoxicated in the swirl of action, I suddenly see a dark veil pass over my eyes. Then, all of a sudden, it’s a total blackout. I blink, squint my eyes, feel my eyelids. Still nothing. Blind. My hearing’s been taken over by a continuous buzzing, my hands are numb. Suddenly I feel myself lose control of my body.
It seems there was a great crash when I collapsed and tumbled to the ground.
When I woke up, my head was on the floor and all I could see was dark patches. Water Lily took me to one of the network’s liaison agents who lived nearby to look after me. I was so afraid that without me the documents wouldn’t be completed in time, that I insisted they shouldn’t let me sleep for more than one hour. I remember something Water Lily said then that has fixed within me the sense of responsibility for the lives of others: “We need a forger, Adolphe, not another corpse.”
1. Service du travail obligatoire—the Compulsory Labor Service under which hundreds of thousands of French workers were compelled to enlist and were sent to Germany as forced labor.
2. The Jewish Scouts of France, the Éclaireuses et éclaireurs israélites de France, known as the EEIF or the EIF. [MM]
3. Union générale des Israélites de France—the General Union of French Jews, an organization set up by the Nazis along the same lines as the Jewish Councils formed in occupied central European countries to collaborate in the deportations.
4. List of organizations: Zionist Youth Movement; Jewish Combat (sometimes “Fighting”) Organization; Organization to Save the Children; National Liberation Movement; Liberation North; Irregulars and Partisans, of which MOI, the Immigrant Workers, a resistance organization of immigrant workers from the French Confederation of Trade Unions, was part.
5. The French Resistance that operated mainly in rural areas. [MM]
“HOW DOES one become a forger?”
“Why? Is it a job opportunity you’re interested in?”
How does one become a forger? I’d say… by chance. Well, not entirely. It turned out that during the years before I joined the Resistance I’d unwittingly accumulated all the knowledge I would need. After that, all I had to do was to apply it.
Like many adolescents, during the war I dreamed of being in the Resistance. I greatly admired the men who fought in the maquis, although I was a pacifist myself, incapable of bearing a gun. Even when I was at elementary school it was my little brother who, stronger and braver than me, stood up for me when there were fights. I was the gentle one of the family, timid, contemplative. I dreamed of being a painter but ‘that’s not a trade,’ they’d tell me. What is certain is that without that situation, without the war, I would have led the most ordinary of lives. I would have been a dyer, at most a chemist.
My training, if I may put it like that, began when I went to live in Vire, in Normandy. I was thirteen.
It wasn’t the first time we’d moved. The history of my family is typical of that of most Eastern European Jews during those years: a history of repeatedly being exiled, often by force. My parents, both of them Russian, met in Paris in 1916. My mother had fled the pogroms and chosen the ‘country of the rights of man’. As for my father, he never told us the reasons for his coming to France, but I know that he was a journalist for the newspaper of the Bund,1 and I’m sure it was his sympathy with Marxist ideology that had forced him into exile. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the French government ordered the immediate expulsion of all Russian nationals who were considered to be ‘reds’. As a former member