The photographer Adolfo Kaminsky, a forger of documents at the service of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation and later the anti-colonial movements, has died in Paris at the age of 97.
It is estimated that the documents that Adolfo Kaminsky forged in France saved more than three thousand Jewish families from death and deportation to Nazi extermination complexes during World War II (1939-1945).
Kaminsky’s death on Monday was confirmed to Agence France Presse by his daughter, Sarah Kaminsky, author of “The Forger,” a biography of her father. The Edmund Michelet History Museum, in Brive-la-Gaillarde, France, announced today that it will hold the exhibition dedicated to the photographer until May 27.
Adolfo Kaminsky, born in 1925 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into a Russian family of Jewish origin, who moved to France in the early 1930s, joined the French Resistance in Paris during World War II (1939-1945), with only 17 years.
When he joined the French Resistance, the clandestine network to which he belonged had close ties to organizations such as the Zionist Youth Movement, the Jewish Combat Organization, the Obra de Socorro à Infância and the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, which received instructions of London, as well as the communist networks Franco Shooters Partisans (FTP), and the group Mão-de-Obra Imigrante.
After the Liberation of Paris in June 1944, Adolfo Kaminsky was recruited by the French secret services to fabricate false documents for Allied soldiers, who were projected behind Nazi lines.
Later he dedicated himself to the production of documents for Jewish survivors of the concentration camps who were clandestinely sent to Palestine (1946-1948), and then joined the National Liberation Front during the Algerian War.
Kaminsky initiated anti-Franco Spanish and anti-fascist Portuguese revolutionaries, namely the Portuguese José Hipólito dos Santos of LUAR – Liga de Unidad y Acción Revolucionaria, into forgery techniques, and provided false identities to those fighting in Guatemala against the coup leader General Castillo Armas, such as as well as the opponents of the dictatorship of the Colonels, in Greece, the Brazilian political refugees and the North American deserters who refused to fight in Vietnam, among others.
“I do not regret any fight that I have waged. I acted out of conviction and in support of the people who are victims of oppression, in the name of freedom and following what my conscience dictated,” said Kaminsky, in the long dialogue with his daughter, reproduced in the book “The counterfeiter”, published in Portugal in 2020.
At the time of the publication of the biography, the daughter of Adolfo Kaminsky told the Lusa agency that her father risked his life when he was wanted by the Nazis during World War II, but he also secretly engaged in other combats, not making distinctions between races, men and women, religion or skin color.
“I think he is a profoundly humanist figure. He never joined any political party, despite having worked a lot with communists, anarchists and people on the left, but he never took a political position because he wanted to be free. He embraced a position of freedom, resistance, which included many struggles,” explained Sarah Kaminsky, a French actress and screenwriter, who stressed that she was “shocked” when she learned the whole truth about her father, known as the “man of a thousand lives.” .
“It was always like this all my life but, in reality, he didn’t tell me everything when I was a child. My father married an Algerian lady very late and my brother and I were born in Algeria. And when we went to France, in 1982 , I had no documents, I still had Argentine nationality and my mother didn’t even have papers to stay in French territory, which is a bit ironic, being a ‘counterfeiter’ and not having papers for your own family.” recalled Sarah Kaminsky in 2020.
“He was a hero of the Second World War but then he helped the Algerians and the French who fought for the independence of Algeria and the Algerian question was a painful subject for many people for a long time and even in 1982, when we returned to France, they were many death threats,” he says, recalling the role his father also played in supporting deserters from the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1975), during the Estado Novo dictatorship.
The convictions, struggles, adventures and clandestine life as a resister are revealed by the operator himself to his daughter in the book “O Falsificador”, which highlights the humanist character of the father during the political convulsions of the second half of the 20th century.
“When I was born, my father no longer made false documents. I was born [em 1979] in the second part of his life. He was a father who respected the rules a lot and told us that the rules and laws must be followed. Later, when I found out that he made false documents, I was very surprised by him. One day I had a bad grade at school that had to be signed by the parents and I imitated my mother’s signature. She caught me and punished me, but my father came into my room laughing and said, ‘Sarah, everyone can see that this signature is a fake,'” he recalls, stressing that Kaminsky’s life was guided by a deep respect for freedom.
“He would say many times that the laws must be respected but that sometimes the ‘laws of men’ should not be followed, leaving us, then, with our free will because ‘sometimes’, he said, ‘it is necessary to transgress when the laws lead people to death'”, the author of the biography of Adolfo Kaminsky also told Lusa.
Source: TSF
