I recently watched a documentary short on YouTube about Adolfo Kaminsky, who died a couple of weeks ago. It’s a visually interesting short film that utilizes silhouette paper cut-outs reminiscent of Javanese shadow puppets to share the life of this all-but-obscure man. The technical work is fantastic—but that’s not why I commend it to you. Instead, I’d like you to meet Mr. Kaminsky.
Adolfo was a teenager in Paris when World War II began. He had graduated from elementary school but instead of going on to more advanced education, he took a job as a dyer of cloth for a boss who encouraged his experiments with chemicals and colors. Had life gone differently, his name might have become famous in the fashion world for the beauty and creativity of his work.
But Adolfo was a Jew.
The family home was destroyed, Adolfo’s mother was killed, and the remaining family was slated for deportation. Only the fact that they were Argentinian, not French, citizens saved them from certain death. Young Adolfo, upon his release, was determined to work with the French resistance to do whatever he could to help those left behind. Ironically, it was his work as a dyer of cloth that made him uniquely qualified to begin life as a forger.
The Nazis didn’t do anything without documents, so having the right ones could literally be the difference between life and death. Adolfo used his skills to remove the red JUIVE stamp from ration cards, allowing French Jews to get food. He meticulously recreated the numerous official Nazi stamps out of rubber so he could make any document pass close inspection at a checkpoint or by a solider on the street. He obtained lists of Jews scheduled to be arrested the next day and went door to door during the night, offering to create documents that would provide safety to whole families. At one point, he created false documents for 300 children at a rate of 30 per hour, aware that to sleep for an hour meant 30 children would die. He never took pay for his work. He is credited with saving the lives of over 14,000 Jews.
Following the war, Adolfo continued in the profession that he had not chosen but had clearly chosen him. He continued to create forged documents for people fleeing war, persecution, and genocide for the next 30 years. His daughter, Sarah Kaminsky, has written a book called “Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life.” It is next on my reading list.
So why bring Mr. Kaminsky to your attention? One thing: Adolfo never knew most of the people for whom he made documents. Most of them never knew him. But without question, he enabled them to live instead of die. They were strangers whose lives touched only for the briefest of moments, through ink on paper instead of flesh. And neither Adolfo nor those he helped were ever the same.
One life can make a difference. How does yours?
