Adolfo Kaminsky

by Sarah Kaminsky

  “How is she?”

  “Like you, impatient. Turn your head a little to the right. Good. What shall I put as your profession on the documents?”

  “Teacher.”

  “And for your name?”

  “Michelle Marivaux, I like that.”

  “Chin up—perfect. That’s OK, you can get changed.”

  The photographic session goes on. When it’s time for me to leave, we find it difficult to say goodbye. I decline her invitation to stay for lunch.

  “Another time, perhaps. I have too much to do today.”

  “Oh yes, that’s right, you’re always in a hurry, aren’t you?”

  Then, as usual, we give each other a good pair of kisses on the cheeks with no idea how many days, months or years it’ll be before we see each other again; when the papers are done I won’t be the one taking them to her.

  When I get back to the lab there’s something else I must do. I put my Rolleiflex away in the darkroom, cross the corridor and go into the machine room, so called because it houses the immense amount of equipment I use to print large-format photos for my ‘official’ clientele. On the right, at the very back of the room, underneath the shelves of stationary and photographic materials are my two large trunks. Or, rather, Ernest’s. Out of one of them I take the huge wooden case containing the submachine gun, the machine gun and a large quantity of ammunition, leave the lab and stagger down the five floors of the apartment building. The weaponry is about to get a new owner.

  A political and military terrorist organization called the OAS5 had recently been set up. Their attacks on us were nothing new. From the very beginning the small groups that wanted Algeria to remain French had been setting off bombs to terrorize those in favor of an Algerian national state. During the Jeanson trial the lawyers defending him, Mourad Oussedik and Jacques Vergès, came out in a cold sweat every time they opened their car door. Following the publication of the Manifesto of the 121,6 there had been bomb attacks on the homes and vehicles of numerous well- or less well-known persons. But whereas before no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, now we knew exactly who we were dealing with. The attacks were increasing in number, especially in districts where immigrants lived, and they all bore the mark of the OAS. The bars, cafés, hotels and small businesses run by Algerians had become their preferred targets.

  I knew that the French Federation of the FLN had decided to dispatch a further cargo of arms, coming from Germany or Belgium, to aid the defense of the Algerians against the OAS. My liaison agent, Jeannette, was going to deliver it. She would be driving a trailer with a double floor, double ceiling and double sides, all stuffed full of weaponry.

  Unfortunately, because of the time needed to camouflage all this in the interior of the vehicle, it was taking a long time to arrive.

  Then I had an idea. I remembered that when I was helping Brancourt in Vire, before I was deported to Drancy, I’d been asked to find a hiding place for an important batch of arms that London had parachuted in. At the foot of one of the big trees bordering the fields of an extremely kind old man, Brancourt and I had dug out a very deep hole. No one besides the two of us knew about the hiding place, and Brancourt, as I’d heard from his widow, had died in Indochina a few years after the Liberation. A few days after I’d mentioned this to Jeannette, I was visited by a young Algerian, Belkacem Rhani, a member of the French Federation of the FLN. It was a matter of getting hold of that cache from the Second World War and handing it over to the organization. After all, it wasn’t such a crazy idea, there was hope that nothing had been moved. Belkacem and I traveled to Vire without delay. I found the spot at once. The field was now occupied by a large modern apartment block. We came back empty-handed.

  On the other hand there were Ernest’s weapons that I didn’t know what to do with. A cumbersome burden I’d had to lug around with me every time I moved. How could I have gotten rid of them? Impossible just to throw them away; if I had done so, who knows who might have found and used them? How could I be sure they wouldn’t be used by petty criminals or people involved in organized crime? So far, I’d preferred to keep them myself. But at that time all my friends were falling into the hands of the police, one after the other. You can imagine the risk: a simple police check would have been enough to see me behind bars as well. It was still easy to conceal my activity as a forger: it was quite reasonable for a photographer/photoengraver to have all those machines, chemicals and tools. Stamps and documents can be hidden or destroyed, zinc plates dissolved in acid. But a submachine gun, a machine gun, a revolver, cartridges, plastic and detonators? As you can see, that’s more difficult.

  I gave the contents of the trunks to Belkacem, except the detonators that I thought were too old, therefore dangerous. Given the weight of the weaponry, we agreed that he would make several trips to remove it, in loads of no more than fifteen to twenty kilos, so as not to attract attention when he was was carrying them on foot. The first day he left with a bag full of bullets that was so heavy it made his whole body lean over to one side. To avoid any problems on the way, I put my beautiful Roberval scales on top of the ammunition. It made it even heavier for him, but at least it explained the weight.

  Belkacem came back the next day, and we repeated the scenario.

  On the third day we both agreed it would be more sensible to change our strategy. Even though the street where I lived was particularly quiet, it would have seemed strange for the same man to come three days running and leave carrying the same bag, especially if the man was Algerian. At the time the police, run by Maurice Papon,7 were very keen on hunting down people according to their racial features.

  When I get down to the entrance to the block, carrying my heavy suitcase, I go along Rue des Jeûneurs, turn right into Rue du Sentier, then right again into Rue du Croissant. The rendezvous is at a baker’s. No other indication. A little bell sounds when I open the door. There are three customers in front of me. I join the queue and rummage round in my pocket for some change to buy a baguette. The fat baker’s wife serves the first customer, who leaves, his bread tucked under his arm. At the back a door opens a crack, then a baker appears, covered in flour, cap on his head, white clogs and apron. It’s Belkacem, hardly recognizable in his disguise.

  “And what will it be for you?” the baker’s wife asks.

  “A baguette, please.”

  While she’s counting out the change, Belkacem gives me a sign, then goes out of the shop carrying a shopping bag full of vegetables. I thank the lady, leave and follow him. I’m three meters behind him as we turn right into Rue du Sentier, then right again. We’re in Ruelle Saint-Joseph, a little alley where no one ever goes. He slows down, I hurry up. I go past him. We exchange our loads. I continue straight on toward Rue Montmartre. He turns around in order to avoid the main streets. Ernest’s weapons are now going to serve the cause of Algerian independence.

  1. Front de Libération Nationale, The National Liberation Front in Algeria, in the Algerian War of Independence. [MM]

  2. The first French support network for the FLN that bore the name of the man who set it up, Francis Jeanson.

  3. A communist Egyptian Jew who took over the organization of support for the FLN after the Jeanson network had been broken up.

  4. The trial of the Jeanson network was held in September 1960; six Algerians and seventeen French were accused of supporting the FLN.

  5. Organisation armée secrète—Secret Armed Organization; sometimes Organisation de l’armée secrète—Organization of the Secret Army.

  6. The Manifesto of the 121 or the Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war was signed by famous French intellectuals, professors and artists. Its publication coincided with the start of the Jeanson trial and contributed to the stir it made in the media.

  7. A French civil servant who was in charge of the police in Paris during the Nazi Occupation and into the 1960s. [MM]

  8

  “HOW IS IT that you came to be helping the Algeria
ns?”

  As you can well imagine, joining a network helping the Algerians didn’t happen overnight. When I joined the Jeanson network I’d already been thinking about the Algerian struggle for several years. But what can you do, alone, without a network or contact, besides harping about doing something to help them while sitting around a table in the café with your buddies? To put it in a nutshell, I wanted to help but didn’t know how.

  But let’s go back a little. In 1948, when my comrades all emigrated to Israel, I kept the Rue d’Écosse laboratory, which had all my equipment and, since I had nowhere to go, I lived there for several months, sleeping on a simple cot.

  “And your family?”

  The war had split it up. Each of us made his or her own life and tried to get by the best we could. My sister was getting ready to emigrate to Israel. My father and brothers were living in Paris, but we saw very little of each other.

  So there I was at twenty-three, alone, without papers, with no fixed income or an ‘official’ past. I took on little jobs, as a photographer or dyer, but they never matched my abilities or my hopes, since I had no formal qualifications and couldn’t claim any of the usual professional experience.

  All my friends had left and, to overcome my loneliness, I threw myself body and soul into photography. Every night I climbed up onto the roofs of Paris to take shots of the sleeping city. That was when my artistic ambition was aroused and the laboratory of forged papers opened up again, transformed into a photographic and chemical laboratory. Gradually I started to enjoy life again.

  There was a friend who often accompanied me on my nocturnal escapades. Ervin Preis was a young Hungarian, a former member of the MOI and as enthusiastic as I was. It was during a dinner arranged by his wife that Jeanine, a young, pretty student appeared in my life. All of her family, Polish Jews by origin, had perished in the extermination camps. Only Jeanine and her sister had survived, thanks to their parents’ ingenious idea of finding them positions as maids in German households.

  A few months after we met, Jeanine and I were married. Our daughter Marthe was born in 1950, her little brother Serge one year later. However, it only took two years for our marriage to fail miserably. Too many misunderstandings put an end to our love. I went back to the cot in Rue d’Écosse, surrounded by my chemicals and machines.

  I can only describe the years that followed as unsettled. I often changed my address, my job and my partner as well. In reality, my reintegration into ‘normal’ life proved difficult. My childhood shortened by the war, the years underground, the people I hadn’t been able to save and Drancy had marked me indelibly. I couldn’t accept that all that was over for me, and my nightmares were haunted by too many faces.

  Professionally I had better and worse times—they varied. Eventually I took a permanent job with a firm that did photographic work, for whom I specialized in giant-format photos for cinema sets. Completely independent and working closely with the directors and designers, I would go off to take the shots with a wide-angle 18 × 24 camera I lugged around and, after having developed and printed them out, I would go and stick them up in the cinema studios. I was lucky enough to take photos for the sets of Alexandre Trauner,1 the celebrated designer for the films of Marcel Carné.

  As always, I wasn’t interested in routine work. What I enjoyed was solving technical problems, learning new processes, doing research.

  When I set up on my own, one of my very first clients was the architect and Marxist town planner Anatole Knopp. He would order large-format pictures for information stands, shop windows, the façades of the pavilions at the fête de l’Huma,2 or historical exhibitions on subjects that interested me such as the Commune, the life of Romain Rolland3 or the coal mines of northern France.

  Then I specialized in the reproduction of works of art. Meticulous, painstaking, technical work. All the things I liked. The majority of my clientele were my painter friends, South American for the most part, kinetic artists very active in the area of abstract geometric painting and Op Art. Unfortunately Oswaldo Vigas, Yaacov Agam, Jesús Soto, Carmelo Arden-Quin or Antonio Asis were not artists who are recognized today. Very often—not to say almost all the time—I had to ignore unpaid bills.

  In the summers of 1953 and 1954 I went twice to Algeria with Colette, my partner at the time and a photographer like me, whose father, a Greek businessman, had been living in Algeria for a long time. It was one of the more, let’s say, prosperous periods in my life. Colette and I were living in a little disused factory that would nowadays be called a loft and that we also used as a photographic studio. We made photos for interior decoration, shop windows, and advertising for chain stores.

  Thanks to this steady clientele, we had regular commissions and even time to go on summer vacations. She used to go and visit her father as often as possible, and in those two years I accompanied her. Over there I saw the serious problems caused by colonization. I became acutely aware of the distinction between the two categories of population, the French on the one hand and the ‘French Muslims of Algeria’—as people said at the time when they were being polite, although the word ‘Arabs’ came more automatically to their lips—on the other. I saw the racism, the discrimination, the public humiliation. I saw the Algerians being addressed by the familiar ‘tu’ while the French were called ‘Monsieur’. Faced with scenes that made me feel very uncomfortable, I was often ashamed of my status as a white person. I was ashamed for France.

  It would be an untruth to generalize and say that everyone was racist. I did of course also meet some marvelous people who even fought for civil rights equality between the French and the ‘natives’. In fact it was from them that I learned that they didn’t have the same rights and that French law made them into a subcategory: the French had the right to vote but not the French Muslims. But when I was at school hadn’t I learned that Algeria was France? So what did that say about the ‘equality’ between citizens?

  I regarded this magnificent country with its infinitely rich culture as a pressure cooker ready to explode. The condescending attitude of the majority of the French in Algeria toward the Algerians, the paternalistic proprietorial relationship to quasi-slaves, could only fan the flames of this well-stoked fire. Colette and I took photos of Algiers and the very beautiful faces of children looking at us from behind bars. These photographs showed all the beauty and gravity of Algeria.

  The first day of the insurrection, November 1, 1954 went more or less unnoticed in France. There was talk of terrorists, of attacks. As for me, I wasn’t fooled, as I had been during the uprising of May 8, 1945, during the first demonstration for the independence of Algeria that coincided with the capitulation of Germany. At the time, the press had made no mention of the slaughter of several hundred civilians. The event had been presented as an outpouring of hatred by extremist, anti-Semitic and anti-French Muslims, who were demonstrating their support for defeated Nazi Germany. I’d believed it.

  As you will know, for years no one talked of the ‘war’ in Algeria. It was the departure of the first servicemen who’d been called up again4 and the propaganda about the ‘pacification’ of Algeria that opened my eyes and really disturbed me. As far as I remember, for me the war began then, even though the lying official discourse was doing its best to conceal the fact: if there was no war why send all those young people there? I felt solidarity with the recalled soldiers who were demonstrating because I was already firmly convinced that France was sending her children to the slaughterhouse. And very angry with the representatives of the left: apart from the Trotskyists of the PCI5 and the left-wing Christians, no one declared openly for Algerian independence. The Communist Party? Silence. The French section of the Workers’ International? Forget it.

  It was during this time that I met a young black American woman, Sarah Elizabeth Penn from New York, at an end-of-shooting party organized by the filmmaker Jean Rouch. We stayed together the whole evening. She gabbled in her delightful ‘franglais’, drank and danced, laughed at her own c
lumsiness and at mine. By the end of the evening I was madly in love. Quite simply love at first sight. At that time my schedule wasn’t particularly full, and it so happened that I’d just been hired by a photographic firm specializing in tourist posters and picture postcards, for which I was getting ready to go off on an assignment, a seven-month trip along the coasts of Europe.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I asked her when we’d hardly known each other for a few weeks.

  With a flutter of eyelashes, she agreed, and we set off in a Renault 4CV. We camped, erecting our tent wherever we found a little patch of paradise. I took my photos very early in the morning and spent the rest of the day showing Sarah Elizabeth the landscapes and towns we were passing through; she marveled at everything. The lack of comfort didn’t matter, for the very first time my life was a perfect idyll with not a cloud on the horizon. We understood each other. I taught her how to take photos, she painted some very beautiful portraits and made jewels of African inspiration. True, we weren’t rich at all but we were artists, free and happy! This Bohemian life suited both of us. We worked in silence, side by side; at the end of the day and late into the night we were making plans for the future. We could already see ourselves enjoying artistic success, in France, perhaps in the United States. We even went so far as to imagine what our future children would look like, and all this made me forget my Parisian concerns, the worries of everyday life. Politics and everything that was at stake—peace and war—blotted out. After two years with Sarah Elizabeth, of which half the time was spent going up and down the coasts, the question of moving to the States became more and more urgent. I started talking about it to my employer who, after having tried everything to keep me in Paris, made me an offer I’d hardly dared hope for: a trial period with his firm in the United States followed by a position over there.

  Sarah Elizabeth went first, in order to see her family again. We’d agreed I’d follow four months later, at the beginning of 1958, to give me time to get myself sorted out, to sell everything I owned or give it to friends to look after. I put the news around: I was going to America…