International Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

Art students in year 8 and 9 at St Richard Gwyn have created a series of digital collages remembering the efforts of Adolfo Kaminsky who helped thousands of Jewish people escape from the Nazis.

Adolfo Kaminsky’s talent was as unassuming as could be: he knew how to remove supposedly indelible blue ink from paper. But it was a skill that helped save the lives of thousands of Jewish people in France during the second World War.

He had learned how to remove such stains as a young teenager working for a clothes dyer and dry cleaner in his Normandy town. When he joined the anti-Nazi resistance at just 18 years old, his expertise enabled him to erase Jewish-sounding names like Abraham or Isaac that were officially inscribed on French ID and food ration cards, and substitute them with typically gentile-sounding ones.

The forged documents allowed Jewish children, their parents and others to escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and in many cases to flee Nazi-occupied territory for safe havens. Kaminsky always refused payment for his forgeries, supporting himself with work as a commercial photographer.

At one point, Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.

He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.” Over the course of the war, he produced enough documents to save the lives of 14,000 Jews.

Kaminsky learned to fashion various typefaces, a skill he had picked up in school while editing a school newspaper, and was able to imitate those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it, too, resembled the kind used on official documents, and created his own rubber stamps, letterheads and watermarks.

“I saved lives because I can’t deal with unnecessary deaths – I just can’t,” he told The New York Times in 2016. “All humans are equal, whatever their origins, their beliefs, their skin colour. There are no superiors, no inferiors. That is not acceptable for me.”

Kaminsky died on Monday 9th January 2023 at his home in Paris, he was 97 years old.