Читать книгу Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life - Sarah Kaminsky - Страница 9

1

PARIS, JANUARY 1944. When I get to the entrance of the Métro at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I hurry down without wasting any time. I need to get to the eastern part of Paris, a train heading for Père-Lachaise. I choose a folding seat, keeping away from the other passengers. I have something precious in my attaché case, which I clutch to my chest. I tick off the stations mentally as they pass. République, only three to go. There’s noise, voices coming from the next car. The train has been whistling for several seconds now, but the doors aren’t closing. The sound of voices is replaced by footsteps, loud, sharp, very distinctive. I recognize them at once. A burning sensation sears my chest at the very moment a Militia patrol, with their armbands and their berets pulled down tight over close-shaven heads, bursts into the car. A sign to the driver and the doors close.

“Identity check! Have all bags ready to be searched.”

I don’t look around at them. I wait my turn right at the end of the car. I’ve been used to police checks for ages now, but today I’m frightened.

Keep calm, conceal my emotions. Above all, they mustn’t give me away, not today, not now. Stop my foot from tapping out the imaginary rhythm of a frenzied tune. Stop that drop of sweat from running down my forehead. Stop the blood from pounding through my veins. Slow down my heartbeat. Breathe slowly. Hide my fear. Stoical.

Everything’s fine. I have a mission to carry out. Nothing’s impossible.

Back there, just behind me, they’re inspecting identity cards, rummaging through bags. I have to get off at the next stop. There’s a militiaman guarding each door; it’s obvious I have no chance of avoiding the check, so I get up and go, confidently, to show my papers to the militiaman who’s making his way toward me, waving my hand to show that I have to get off soon. He reads the details on my card out loud, ‘Julien Keller, seventeen, dyer, born in Ain, Creuse département…’ He turns it over and over to examine it from all sides, looking up now and then to observe my reaction with his little suspicious eyes. I remain calm, I know he can’t see how afraid I am. I also know, and I’m sure of it, that my papers are in order—I was the one who fabricated them.

“Papers in order… Keller, is that Alsatian?”

“Yes.”

“And what have you got in there?”

That’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. The militiaman points to the attaché case I’m holding, my hand clutching the handle nervously. For a brief moment I think I can feel the ground giving way beneath me. I’d like to take to my heels and clear off, but any attempt to flee would be futile. A wave of panic makes my blood run cold. I have to improvise, and do it quickly.

“Are you deaf? What have you got in there?” the militiaman asks, raising his voice a little.

“My sandwiches. Do you want to see them?” Suiting the action to the word, I open my attaché case.

No problem, there are some sandwiches inside. They just have to conceal the things I have to hide at all costs. After a moment’s hesitation, the militiaman gives me a hard look, scanning my face, searching for any weakness. So I give him my most inane smile, something I’ve always been able to do when necessary: to look very stupid. The following seconds seem like hours. We’ve reached Père-Lachaise station, and the train is whistling to indicate the doors are going to close.

“OK, you can go.”

I remember very well the shrill whistle of the wind over the graves in the cemetery. Sitting on a bench by one of the paths in the Pére-Lachaise, I hadn’t come to sit and meditate. My teeth were chattering, my body trembling. I’d had to get out of the metro and drag myself to the cemetery in order to find the solitude I needed to pull myself together again and allow the feelings I’d kept hidden beneath an apparent calm to resurface. I called that the retrospective shock: the body ridding itself of repressed emotions. I just had to wait patiently for my pulse to get back down to normal, for my hands to stop clenching, to relax. How long did it take? I don’t know. Five or ten minutes perhaps. Enough time for me to get cold and collect my thoughts. Enough time for me to remember why and for whom I was there, taking risks, and to remind myself how urgent the deliveries were that I was to make. It was this sense of urgency that finally pulled me out of my stupor in the oppressive silence of the cemetery, reminding me that I hadn’t a minute to lose. No time to feel despair or self-pity, afraid or discouraged.

I get ready to set off again. Before I get up, I open my attaché case, taking every precaution, for one final check. I lift up the sandwich. Everything’s still there. My treasures. Fifty blank French identity cards, my pen, my ink, my rubber stamp and a stapler.

On that day, as on so many others before, I knock at all the doors on a list I was given the previous day and that I’ve spent the night learning by heart: the names and addresses of dozens of Jewish families who, according to what the network has learned thanks to sympathizers who’ve infiltrated the bureaucracy, are to be rounded up at dawn. I go up the Boulevard de Ménilmontant then take the Rue des Couronnes to get to the alleys behind the Boulevard de Belleville. Each time new faces are superimposed on these unknown names. Rue du Moulin-Joly, the Blumenthal family, Maurice, Lucie and their children, Jean, Éliane and Véra, have taken the forged papers, now their life underground is beginning.

In the best cases they already have passport photos, I just have to staple them to the blank identity cards then carefully fill them out in the handwriting of a city hall clerk. Sometimes they’re happy to take the forged papers but haven’t got the necessary materials needed to complete them on the spot. Nevertheless, they take my visit seriously and assure me they won’t be at home the next day at the time the roundup is to take place. Some have an uncle, a girlfriend, a cousin where they can hide. Others have no one.

There are some who refuse at first, then change their minds when I assure them it’s a free offer. But unfortunately not everyone is so easy to convince. That evening, for example, there was Madame Drawda, Rue Oberkampf. A widow who astounded me by her lack of awareness, her obstinate insistence about seeing me as someone dishonest.

When I offered her the papers, she was offended: “Why should I hide, I who’ve done nothing, who’ve been French for several generations?” I had time to see, over her shoulder, the table set in the parlor with four children around it, quietly eating their supper. I did everything I could to try and convince her. I explained that my network made it their business to hide children, they would be in an absolutely secure place, with decent people, out in the country, and she would even get news of them. Begging her got me nowhere; she simply wasn’t listening, didn’t want to hear what I was saying, just stood there looking indignant. What really struck me was that after having listened to me telling her what I’d seen with my own eyes when I was interned in Drancy, the thousands of deportees, whole trainloads being sent to their death, she coldly replied that the death camps didn’t exist, that she didn’t believe the lies of Anglo-American propaganda. Then, after pausing for a second, she became threatening and warned me that if I didn’t leave immediately, she would call the police. Had she not realized that the police, the ones who would come to arrest her and her children in the morning, would not be coming to protect them?

With my case and my sorrow as a double burden, I continued on my way, from door to door, counting and making lists in my head, the future clandestine Jews on the one hand, the deportees on the other. I knew already that I would always remember the latter, that I would never be entirely able to erase their names, their faces from my memory. That I would have nightmares about them. Well aware that I was perhaps the last witness of their freedom, I tried to make a little space for them in my memories.

It was no use hurrying, the glacial darkness of winter nights had finally swept away the clear February sun. After the last door of the last address had closed behind me, it was long past the time of the curfew. I had to turn into a shadow, hug the walls, avoid the light of the street lamps, muffle my steps, glide over the ground and disappear. But above all, I had to find a telephone booth to let my contact know I’d finished my sector: dial a number, leave a coded message, and only then could I go home.

After twenty minutes of walking anxiously, I finally saw in the distance the outlines of the brick building of the Young Men’s Hostel, nowadays the Women’s Refuge. At that time, it was a hostel for students and young workers. It was very cheap, and I lodged there until I could find something better. When I got to the barred entrance I rang the bell several times, but no one came to open up. I was cold, my feet were frozen, and I was locked out during the curfew. Everywhere in the darkness I thought I could see threatening silhouettes, shadows, hear voices. I felt I was in danger. Nowhere to go.

Exhausted. Having rung the bell one last time, though without deluding myself that anyone might come, I went to hide in the entrance to an apartment block, sitting on a step, hunched up, arms wrapped around me, waiting for daybreak. Unable to get a wink of sleep, startled by every gust of wind, I thought back to Madame Drawda, to all those I hadn’t managed to convince, to the children especially. I felt guilty without being able to say of what. I regretted not having been able to find the right words, convincing arguments. I wanted to continue to believe that my efforts, like those of my comrades, had not been in vain. Never give up. I wondered whether Otter had managed to finish his round before the curfew, whether he’d been able to hand out more papers than me. I hoped he hadn’t been arrested, for if he had it meant he was already dead. It was January 1944. Contrary to what it said on my papers, I wasn’t seventeen, I’d just turned eighteen. I’ve made myself a year younger in order to avoid the STO.¹ After a childhood that had been abruptly interrupted by the beginning of the war, I still didn’t feel entirely grown-up, but from now on I knew for certain that there was nothing of a child about me anymore.

I knew, of course, that all the police were hunting for the Paris forger. I knew that because I’d found a way of producing such a quantity of forged documents that very quickly the whole of the North Zone, as far as Belgium and the Netherlands, was flooded with them. Anyone who needed forged papers in France knew that if they could establish contact with any branch of the Resistance, they would get them immediately. So, obviously, if everyone knew that, then the police did as well. The more we made, the more we had to redouble our precautions. The main advantage I had over the police was that they were probably looking for a ‘professional’ with machines, printing presses, a wood pulp factory; none of them could have suspected at the time that the forger they were after was nothing but a boy.

Obviously—and fortunately—I was not alone. The man in charge of the laboratory was called Sam Kugiel; he was twenty-four. We called him by his nickname, ‘Otter’. The person who’d formerly been in charge and had given that up in order to deal with the convoys of children and frontier crossings was Renée Gluck, alias ‘Water Lily’, a chemist who was also twenty-four. Both of them had taken their aliases from the names they’d had when they’d belonged to the Jewish Scouts of France (EEIF),² where they’d met before the war. In the laboratory there were also Suzie and Herta Schidlof, sisters who were twenty and twenty-one, students at the Beaux-Arts who made a particularly valuable contribution, as much for their hard work as for their eternal good humor. That was the set-up at the laboratory for forged papers of the ‘6th’ you’ve heard so much about, a secret section of the UGIF.³ No one outside the five of us knew the address of the laboratory; even our leaders were kept in ignorance of the secret. On no account should they know, and by strictly respecting this rule we were confident of avoiding getting caught up in lots of disasters.

As cover we pretended to be painters. Our laboratory for forged papers was in a narrow little attic room on the top floor of number 17, Rue des Saints-Pères, which we had transformed into an artist’s studio. It was tiny, hardly fifteen meters square, but thanks to a skylight we at least enjoyed fine daylight. Two tables placed end to end took up the whole length of the room. On the one: two typewriters; on the other: sheets of blotting paper. On shelves fixed to the wall I had set out all my chemicals and different inks, scrupulously arranged by order of use. And, as we’d put a few brushes next to them, there was nothing to suggest that they weren’t cans of paint and solvents. In order to increase our work surface, I’d cobbled together dozens of sliding shelves that went under the two tables. Thus we could dry out a large number of documents at once with nobody the wiser. The other walls were covered in paintings that we’d dashed off ourselves and behind which we hid the forged papers we’d made, until we could hand them over to our liaison agents. Each of us kept to a set timetable, office hours, so as not to arouse the concierge’s suspicions, and from time to time we would arrive with a painter’s palette. In that way none of our neighbors came to ask about the smell of the chemicals. The same was true of the man who came to read the electricity meters. Every time he came to the laboratory, he congratulated us on our pictures. As soon as we could no longer hear his footsteps on the stairs, we burst out laughing for, you can believe me, there was nothing remarkable about our paintings.

The particular feature of our network was its having been created at the very heart of the UGIF, a governmental Jewish organization established by the Vichy regime and financed by the money and goods of the Jews that had been requisitioned by the state. Its task was to gather the Jews together; the UGIF placed minors in children’s homes, allowed them to go to school and ensured they were given appropriate food, with the result that many thought its motives were honest and genuine. In reality, the French state had found an infallible means of preparing for the systematic deportation of Jews under the cloak of morality by getting ahead of all the other occupied countries with a system of establishing files and using punch-cards: the Jews had no other place to go and, with the ban on working, were all irremediably dependent on the UGIF and residents in its charitably run hostels. Then they were put on file and rounded up almost immediately.

When they discovered that they were unknowingly taking part in all these deportations, some of the UGIF officials decided to create a clandestine section that they financed with some of the funds they had at their disposal. They recruited volunteers, notably from the Jewish Scouts of France because they were young and loyal and were only too keen to join the Resistance. At the beginning they formed the major part of the network. Thus, thanks to its double agents, the 6th had the advantage of prior access to almost all the lists of those who were to be rounded up in the UGIF hostels or elsewhere.

I was the last to join the laboratory of the 6th section, but as soon as I arrived I had to turn all their methods upside down. When Water Lily told me that she removed the Jew stamp with absorbent cotton soaked in ordinary correction fluid or bleach that had been boiled and then Suzie re-colored the card with crayons, I almost fainted. Their method was far too risky. I immediately explained that on contact with skin and sweat the writing would reappear in yellow a few days later. And if they didn’t neutralize the correction fluid with an alkaline substance, it would continue to eat away at the paper, and the area that had been treated would take on the texture of blotting paper. The identity card would be no use at all. They looked on dumbfounded as I demonstrated my own chemical solutions and showed them how they should go about it from then on. This was very easy for me. I had all this technical knowledge from my experience as a dyer and the hours I’d spent with an expert in the chemistry of milk. Thanks to my apprenticeship in dyeing, I knew how to dye a cotton thread without affecting the woolen thread. Moreover I’d started doing experiments in chemistry when I was fourteen, doing research into erasing so-called ‘indelible’ inks. Despite years of analyzing them I hadn’t found one that worked—you can delete them all.

I was amused by their enthusiastic response. Suzie talked of magic. A few days later Water Lily decided to devote herself to the convoys of children, convinced that the laboratory for forged papers had found its chemical engineer and would have no further need of her services.

That was only the beginning. Subsequently forging documents became more and more complicated, while at the same time the demand for forged papers was growing day by day. When I joined the network, the 6th section was already in close liaison with other Jewish networks, the Mouvement de jeunesse sioniste (MJS), the Organisation juive de combat (OJC), the free clinic in Rue Amelot and the Oeuvre de secours à l’enfance (OSE). Later other networks formed closer links with us; for example, the Mouvement de libération nationale (MLN) took its orders from London and cooperated with Combat, and Libération Nord, but also the communist networks—the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) and the Main-d’Oeuvre immigrée (MOI).⁴ The unified Resistance was getting organized. A web was being spun between the different networks, and each one used its special skills to combat the deportations and organize the maquis units.⁵ These interconnections made it possible to exchange crucial information. The Resistance, which until then had consisted of small, isolated initiatives and groups, was gradually acquiring a structure in which the separate units, like the tentacles of an octopus, were becoming interdependent. We became the most resourceful and effective laboratory in France, the only one to have large-scale production capacity, for by that time I’d found techniques that meant we no longer had to falsify existing documents but could produce new ones as genuine as if they came from the government printing office. I converted the paper myself to make it thicker and made my own ‘official’ rubber stamps.

Here I must add that I didn’t have just one lab at my disposal, but two. When Maurice Cachou, who was in charge of forged papers for the MLN, heard of my achievements, he contacted me directly to ask whether I could do photoengraving. At that time, to avoid lengthy journeys with their police checks, I’d left the Young Men’s Hostel and had taken a room in another boarding house in Rue Jacob, very close to the 6th’s laboratory. I made a pretense of being an amateur photographer, and the boarding-house cook, who’d become fond of me, let me have a room above mine that she kept empty, assuming I was using it for photographic experiments. In fact, it was there that I set up the MLN research laboratory for forged papers.

Another maid’s room, but this time one with an address that was absolutely secret, since I was the only person to have access to it. It was there that I converted the paper, at night, and where, thanks to photoengraving processes, I reproduced an endless stream of stamps, letterhead paper and watermarks. All the blank documents came from my Rue Jacob lab. Everything there was improvised, set up with materials salvaged from junk shops and bits and pieces. But by cobbling things together I managed to reproduce highly sophisticated machines, as good as those in real photoengraving studios. Since centrifugal force was the only effective way of spreading the photosensitive fluid on the plates, I invented a centrifuge made from a bicycle wheel. My pipe made an excellent tool for smoothing out documents impaired by acid substances. In fact that was all I used it for—I’ve never smoked. With converging and diverging lenses and a little semi-transparent mirror, I reproduced a machine used by Leonardo da Vinci that projected a virtual image of the drawing—or stamp—to be reproduced by hand, making a very precise line possible. That was all hand-crafted but very effective! And since I was constantly having to invent things, I spent a lot of sleepless nights.

Every morning, all I had to do was to take the blank documents to the 6th’s laboratory to be filled in; it was so close I didn’t have to use the metro.

Our services were made available to everyone. Orders poured in. In ever greater numbers. They came from Paris, from the UGIF, from the South Zone, from London. We had to maintain a rhythm of work that verged upon the unmanageable, sometimes up to five hundred documents a week.

In general it was Otter and I who liaised with those who passed on the orders. I remember that, like me, his appearance was naïve and innocent. It was our best cover. He was short, with sandy hair and freckles, a very small nose and an impish look. A babyish, juvenile look—an open sesame to every door. He was the one who was most often in contact with the Jewish networks; I with the MLN and the communists. But that could change, depending on emergencies. In general we arranged our rendezvous in some busy part of Paris, preferably with a woman. We would meet appearing to be lovers on a date. I always arrived first, each time carrying a rose. Then my ‘fiancée’ and I would ‘go for a walk’ together, making sure we exchanged affectionate glances whenever we felt we might be being observed. By the time we separated we both knew what we had to do.

That day my rendezvous wasn’t with one of my lady loves but with Marc Hamon, alias ‘Penguin’, the man who’d recruited me when I joined the Resistance; he too was a member of the EIF.

I knew that if Penguin was coming in person, it must be because his problem was so urgent that he couldn’t wait until one of the young women in the network was available. We were to meet in the Tuileries garden. When I arrived I found him sitting on a bench looking particularly tired and worried. I commented that he had lost weight since we first met, at which he laughed and returned the compliment. Then he started to speak in more serious tones.

“Yesterday Radio London gave us some good news. The German army is retreating on all fronts, and from now on we have all the armies of North Africa on our side. The problem is that the Nazis have decided to speed up the process of clearing out the Jews by preparing a huge roundup over the whole of the territory. In three days time, ten children’s homes across Paris are going to be raided simultaneously. I have a list for you. I need everything: ration cards, birth certificates, baptismal certificates, plus identity cards for the adults taking them across the border, their orders and the pass for the whole group.”

“How many?”

“How many children? … More than three hundred.”

Three hundred children. That meant more than nine hundred different documents to make. In three days! It was impossible. In general the requests came in bundles of thirty to fifty a day, sometimes a few more. It wasn’t the first big challenge I’d faced, but in this case the shock was almost too much for me. As I left Penguin, for the first time I was afraid I might fail. Up to that point I’d always managed, through my accumulation of miscellaneous knowledge, to find almost miraculous solutions to technical problems. The better the documents became, the more I’d needed to invent, to show ingenuity in forging the unforgeable with the limited means at my disposal. But this time it wasn’t solutions we needed, but quantity, and I knew that I’d reached the maximum productivity I was capable of already. The hours in a day can’t be condensed, and unfortunately they can’t be prolonged either. No time to think it over. First of all I had to run over to Rue Jacob to make paper: closely woven, nice and compact, or fine, textured or untextured, depending on the nature of the documents to be made. I had to hurry, the stopwatch was already running, the race was starting. A race against the clock, against death.

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]