A True, Truthful and Genuine Life
January 28, 2023 9:37 AM   Subscribe

 
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Thank you for posting this
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:08 AM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]


Thanks Mr. Kaminsky! Good job!
posted by Meatbomb at 10:55 AM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]


A hero of the Left. Not only did he save thousands from the Nazi death camps, after WWII he went on to help leftist, anticolonial, and antifascist movements all over the world, never taking money for his work.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:19 AM on January 28, 2023 [18 favorites]


amazing. one person. absolutely a hero.

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posted by supermedusa at 11:32 AM on January 28, 2023 [3 favorites]


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posted by humbug at 11:42 AM on January 28, 2023


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posted by robbyrobs at 12:22 PM on January 28, 2023


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posted by Kattullus at 12:49 PM on January 28, 2023


Z"L
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posted by BlueNorther at 12:55 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


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posted by clavdivs at 1:20 PM on January 28, 2023


What a blessing his life was. Rest in peace.
posted by M. at 1:35 PM on January 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


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In a strange coincidence, I went to see a Holocaust exhibition today. I didn't learn much that I didn't know, but I was reminded that every new generation needs to learn this, the most radical of crimes against humanity.

When I was a little girl, I was taught that Jews need skills, because they are never safe, and can never feel sure they can carry their savings with them. Adolfo Kaminsky expanded that to the max.
posted by mumimor at 1:35 PM on January 28, 2023 [5 favorites]


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posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:07 PM on January 28, 2023


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posted by Coaticass at 2:21 PM on January 28, 2023


Here is his self portrait.
posted by Oyéah at 2:33 PM on January 28, 2023 [18 favorites]


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posted by epj at 2:36 PM on January 28, 2023


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posted by jim in austin at 3:48 PM on January 28, 2023


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posted by annieb at 3:52 PM on January 28, 2023


What a wonderful man.
posted by khrusanthemon at 4:38 PM on January 28, 2023 [2 favorites]


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posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 4:42 PM on January 28, 2023


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posted by Glinn at 5:13 PM on January 28, 2023


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posted by bryon at 5:17 PM on January 28, 2023


He was a hero, and he did it with paper and pens. He saved thousands of people saved when so many people stood by (and worse). Every year we lose more witnesses, and every year people get louder saying it never happened, or it didn’t go far enough.

May he always be remembered.

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posted by Mchelly at 5:31 PM on January 28, 2023 [7 favorites]


Thanks for posting this.
posted by fregoli at 3:29 AM on January 29, 2023 [1 favorite]


I'd never heard of this man, his story is amazing. May his memory be a blessing.
posted by Hactar at 5:41 AM on January 29, 2023 [2 favorites]


Adam Shatz wrote a long obituary of Adolfo Kaminsky worthy of its subject for the London Review of Books. Excerpt:
Only four people worked in the lab. The director was a man known as Loutre (‘Otter’). Kaminsky’s assistants, the Schidlof sisters, Suzie and Herta, were students at the École des Beaux-Arts. This group was not the only one producing false documents, but it was unusually good at making them in large numbers. Most fake papers were made by falsifying existing documents. Kaminsky, however, had discovered a way of manufacturing new documents which, as he put it, looked ‘as real as if they had come out of the National Printing Office’.

Kaminsky described the work in his memoir, A Forger’s Life (2009), written with his daughter Sarah: ‘I dreaded the technical error, the small mistake, the tiny detail that could have escaped me. The slightest second of inattention can prove fatal, and on each piece of paper depends the life or death of a human being.’ He brought the same rigour to the forgeries he later produced for Algerian rebels, insurgents in Latin America and Africa, anti-apartheid activists and opponents of the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal.

As Hannah Arendt pointed out, to have ‘the right to have rights’ a person must belong to a political community, the surest proof of which is having the proper papers. Kaminsky learned this as a child. His parents were Russian Jews who met in Paris in 1916. They were forced to leave a year later, when the French government ordered the expulsion of all Russian nationals suspected of communist sympathies. Kaminsky’s father, Salomon, wasn’t a communist, but he’d been a member of the Bund, a Jewish socialist political organisation. Salomon and Anna Kaminsky moved to Buenos Aires, where they obtained citizenship, and where Adolfo was born in 1925. In 1932, they were allowed to return to France. They eventually settled in Vire, a town in Normandy where Anna’s younger brother, a French citizen and First World War veteran, ran a business.

Their lives were precarious, however, and Adolfo dropped out of school at thirteen to work in a factory that manufactured aircraft dashboards for the army. After France fell to the Germans in June 1940, Jews were banned from working in the factory, but he quickly found an apprenticeship with a chemical engineer who taught him the art of dyeing. He later described his wonder on seeing that, after a piece of clothing had been dyed black, ‘the water would become clear again, like spring water.’
posted by Kattullus at 3:18 AM on February 16, 2023 [1 favorite]


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