Photographer Adolfo Kaminsky, document forger in the service of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation and later 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 keep the exhibition dedicated to the photographer until May 27.
Born in 1925 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a Russian family of Jewish descent, Adolfo Kaminsky, who moved to France in the early 1930s, joined the French Resistance in Paris during World War II (1939-1945), aged just 17 years old.
When he joined the French Resistance, the clandestine network to which he belonged maintained close ties with organizations such as the Zionist Youth Movement, the Jewish Fighting Organization, the Obra de Socorro à Infância and the National Liberation Movement, which received instructions from 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 produce false documents for Allied soldiers, which were projected behind Nazi lines.
He later devoted himself to the production of documents for Jewish concentration camp survivors who were clandestinely shipped to Palestine (1946-1948), and later joined the National Liberation Front during the Algerian War.
Kaminsky initiated anti-Franco Spanish and anti-fascist Portuguese revolutionaries in forgery techniques, namely the Portuguese José Hipólito dos Santos of LUAR – League of Unity and Revolutionary Action, and provided false identities to those who fought in Guatemala against the coup General Castillo Armas, as but also to opponents against the dictatorship of the colonels in Greece, to Brazilian political refugees and to North American deserters who refused to fight in Vietnam, among other places.
“I do not regret any struggles I fought. I acted out of conviction and in support of people who are victims of oppression, in the name of freedom and following what my conscience told me,” Kaminsky said in the long dialogue with his daughter, reproduced in the book “The Falsifier”, published in Portugal in 2020.
At the time of the biography’s publication, Adolfo Kaminsky’s daughter told the Lusa news agency that her father risked his life when he was wanted by the Nazis during World War II, but also engaged in other battles clandestinely, made no distinction between races. , men and women, religion or skin color.
“I believe he is a deeply humanist figure. He never joined a political party, despite working a lot with communists, anarchists and people on the left, but he never took a political stand because he wanted to be free. He embraced a position of freedom, resistance, which included a lot of fighting,” explained French actress and screenwriter Sarah Kaminsky, emphasizing that she was “surprised” when she learned the whole truth about her father, known as the “man of a thousand lives”.
“It’s always been that way all my life, but in reality he didn’t tell me everything when I was a kid. My father married an Algerian woman very late and my brother and I were born in Algeria. And when we came to France, in 1982, he had no documents. He still had Argentinian nationality and my mother didn’t even have legal papers to stay on French soil, which is a bit ironic – being a ‘counterfeiter’ and having no papers for your own family.” , Sarah Kaminsky recalled in 2020.
“He was a hero of the Second World War, but after that 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, it was 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 beliefs, struggles, adventures and clandestine life as a resistance fighter are revealed to his daughter by the operator himself in the book “O Falsificador”, which highlights the father’s humanistic character during the political upheavals of the second half of the 20th century.
“When I was born, my father stopped making false documents. I was born [em 1979] in the second part of his life. He was a father who respected the rules very much and told us that rules and laws had to be followed. When I found out later that he had made false documents, I was very surprised. One day I had a bad grade in school that had to be signed by the parents and I imitated my mother’s signature. She caught me and grounded me, but my father came into my room laughing and said, ‘Sarah, everyone can see that this signature is fake,'” he recalled, emphasizing that Kaminsky’s life was guided by a deep respect for freedom.
“He often said that the laws should be respected, but sometimes the ‘laws of men’ should not be followed, giving us our free will because ‘sometimes’, he said, ‘it is necessary to break when the laws people to death,'” the author of Adolfo Kaminsky’s biography also told Lusa.
Source: DN
