The forger: the remarkable story of how a shy teenager forged documents that helped thousands of Jews escape the Nazis.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: TIMES PAST - Adolfo Kaminsky

His story reads like something out of a spy novel: Risking death at the hands of a brutal dictator, a member of an underground resistance group expertly forges documents that help thousands of people escape to freedom.

Except these events actually happened, and the forger wasn't a seasoned resistance fighter but a shy Jewish teenager who had worked as an apprentice in a clothes-dyeing/dry-cleaning shop. During World War II, Adolfo Kaminsky resourcefully adapted the skills he'd learned on the job to make fake IDs and other documents that helped thousands of fellow Jews in France escape deportation to German concentration camps.

At one point, he had three days to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and food ration cards for 300 Jewish children who were about to be rounded up by Nazi authorities. The goal was to deceive the Germans until the children were sent off to safety with families in the countryside or convents, or smuggled to Switzerland or Spain. He forced himself to stay awake for two straight days, telling himself, "In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour, 30 people will die."

Kaminsky is now 91 years old and living in Paris, and his daughter, Sarah Kaminsky, has told his gripping story in a book recently translated into English, Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life.

To understand Kaminsky's heroism requires dipping into a grim chapter of history. On Sept. 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, sparking World War II (1939-45). German dictator Adolf Hitler had a grandiose plan to conquer all of Europe and murder all of its Jews in what's now known as the Holocaust (see Timeline, p. 18). The German army soon overran Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France. Southern France officially remained independent, with a government based in the town of Vichy (see map), but that regime collaborated with the Nazis, imposed anti-Semitic policies, and helped arrange deportations of Jews to places like Auschwitz in Poland, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps. There, Jews were sorted into two groups: those who could work and those who couldn't. The latter were put to death in gas chambers disguised as showers.

Thousands of Jews were saved, however, by various underground resistance groups. If discovered, members of these groups faced certain death, yet they risked hiding Jews, smuggling food or weapons to them, or transporting them to safety.

Many of the people who engaged in such resistance activities were young, says Michael Berenbaum, an American scholar of the Holocaust. For example, 19-year-old Tina Strobos in Amsterdam helped hide Jews in her family's attic (see "Young & Courageous," p. 18).

"They were more daring because they were at a stage in life where they were responsible just for themselves," Berenbaum says. "They were neither responsible for young children nor old parents."

Acts of Sabotage

Adolfo Kaminsky was one of those young resisters. In 1940, when he was 15, his mother was killed after traveling back from Paris, where she had gone to warn her brother of his impending arrest. Adolfo never learned exactly how she died, but the few clues his family could find convinced him that Nazis had pushed her from a train. Furious at her murder and at the execution of one of his friends by the Germans, Adolfo began engaging in acts of sabotage, using chemicals to rust railway equipment and corrode transmission lines, and making detonators for explosives.

"For the first time I didn't feel entirely impotent following the death of my mother and my friend," he wrote. "At least I had the feeling I was avenging them."

In 1943, when he was 18, Adolfo's family was arrested in their town of Vire in northern France and sent to Drancy, an internment camp near Paris that was a way station to the death camps. But they were released from Drancy after three months because his Russian-born parents had once lived in Argentina, which protested their detention.

Soon after, his family began to fear that their Argentine passports would no longer protect them, so they sent Adolfo to secure false documents from the anti-Nazi French underground. The underground agents soon learned that Adolfo had a special talent: He knew how to remove Waterman ink from clothing. Waterman ink was an indelible blue ink used in official documents like ID cards and food ration cards, and no one in the resistance could figure out how to erase it. If Jews had any chance of escaping deportation, typically Jewish names, like Israel and Abraham, had to be removed from official documents and replaced with French-sounding names.

Adolfo had learned how to remove stains after dropping out of school at 13 to help support his family. He took a job at a clothes-dyeing/dry-cleaning shop in Vire and experimented with chemicals that removed the most stubborn stains. He had also spent hours talking to a chemist at a local dairy about how lactic acid (which forms naturally in milk) could bleach even supposedly permanent blue ink.

Those skills made Adolfo a key member of a Paris underground "laboratory" whose members--all working for no pay--had code names like Water Lily, Penguin, and Otter. They altered documents or created new ones from scratch. Adolfo also produced various typefaces, which he'd learned to do while editing his school newspaper, to match those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it too matched, and created his own "official" rubber stamps, letterheads, and watermarks. Word of the lab spread through the European underground, and soon he and his colleagues were getting orders from London and across Europe and producing 500 documents a week.

Historians estimate that France's resistance networks saved 7,000 to 10,000 children, but more than 11,000 were deported and killed during the Holocaust.

'I Was Lucky'

The work Adolfo did was extremely...