The telephone rang. Lia was quicker getting to it than me: “It’s for you. It’s Stéphane,” she said, visibly relieved that it wasn’t a woman.
At the other end of the line Mattéi gave me a rendezvous for the next day at 8:45 in the evening at La Rhumerie martiniquaise, which in reality meant for this evening at six in La Closerie des lilas. I put on my coat and went out.
He ordered a beer and I, as usual, a white coffee. He wanted my opinion on a request that was a bit out of the normal.
“Tell me, what would you do for a guy who wants some forged papers to thumb his nose at the police, perhaps even hoping to be arrested?”
“Is his life in danger?”
“No. He got expelled from France because of the demos. He wants to come back to speak at a meeting where he’s sure of being arrested again. He wants to make a media splash.”
“What does he risk getting?”
“Expelled again, perhaps a short stay in the slammer; not very much, that is. Look, here’s his latest photo. Of course he’s dyed his hair brown for the occasion.”
When I saw the photo, I smiled.
“So what do you think? Can you do it?”
I promised him the ID card for the next day. I had a big back-up of work, thus very little time to waste on something I wouldn’t normally have considered an emergency, but in this case I felt like making an exception. I headed off to the lab and locked myself in the darkroom. It didn’t take me long to make the ID card. I already had blank cards and rubber stamps ready, and sheets of revenue stamps. All that was left was to invent a typically French name, fill it in, attach the photo and make the card look used.
Three days later I went to pick up Lia at the ORTF to take her out to lunch. I’d been a bit hard on her recently. The café we’d chosen was particularly noisy. While most of those around us were talking about the demonstrations and the return of de Gaulle, Lia unbosomed herself of all her grievances about my conduct toward her: I never listened to her; I was never at home. I was quite happy to do as she wanted, to listen to her for as long as necessary, when my eye was caught by the photo in a newspaper a young blonde woman was reading. It was of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now with brown hair, taken on the platform of the First of May movement. I couldn’t help smiling.
Lia clicked her fingers right in front of my eyes to make me look at her: “You see, you’re not listening to me.”
“Oh, but I am, I am.”
“You’re looking at that blonde girl.”
Of all the forgeries I made throughout my life, that was certainly the one that drew the most media attention and was the least useful, but I have to admit it was a great opportunity to thumb my nose at the strong-arm tactics of the authorities by demonstrating that there’s nothing more porous than borders and that ideas have no respect for them.
In the end, making it possible for Cohn-Bendit to return clandestinely to France while he was banned from the country was my sole contribution to the May rebellion. On the one hand that was because, as a forger, I was always careful not to make my political views public, my place was not among the demonstrators but in my laboratory, where the requests continued to pour in; on the other because, even though I might physically be in Paris, my heart and mind were with those oppressed in the Third World. It was beyond the seas where I was most needed. And I did hope that the worldwide anti-authoritarian ferment of 1968 would breathe new life into the fight against inequality. It was in the context of all this upheaval that I saw Jeannette for the last time.
Jeannette and I had never lost sight of each other since she’d been my liaison agent in the Algerian war. Like Mattéi she’d taken a keen interest in the Cuban revolution. In 1963 she’d been making a documentary on the island, but the militant prevailed over the filmmaker and she abandoned the film to volunteer and join a group of guerrillas in Latin America. Eventually she joined the Guatemalan FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, Rebel Armed Forces). At first she traveled there a few times, then more and more often, always with forged documents I’d made.
The last time she came to the lab was to ask me for a new passport. She and her group were preparing something; they wanted to show that the death of Che Guevara wouldn’t impede the progress of the revolution. I was concerned for her. I tried to dissuade her; at first I even refused to let her have the documents. She looked at me from the depths of her huge, melancholy eyes and, with her childlike smile, calmly replied that, forged papers or not, she was going anyway. So, very reluctantly, I complied with her request; and she flew off to Guatemala.
As usual, at the end of the summer, I didn’t have any money to go away on holiday, and I continued my morning ritual: a large white coffee, a croissant and Le Monde, always in the same café.
The paper didn’t give the name of the young Frenchwoman who’d shot herself through the mouth when the police knocked on her door, but I knew it was her. It could only be her.
How often had she played out the scene before me? It was something that kept cropping up in our conversations. How could she hold out if she were arrested, tortured? How could she refuse to speak? For Jeannette, only death could guarantee complete silence. She’d thought of a cyanide capsule; but then she’d have to hope it would work pretty quickly, otherwise they’d pump her stomach to bring her around. Shoot at the enemy in order to get herself shot? Too risky, she might just be wounded. No, Jeannette had HER solution and she demonstrated it to me several times. With her two outstretched fingers as the barrel of a revolver, she stuck them in her mouth, pointing slightly upward, “because against your temple there’s a chance you might miss.” She’d fire without hesitation, not even giving herself time to think about it.
I retched as I folded the paper. I couldn’t get the croissant down. I put the money for the bill on the table and left without even saying goodbye to the patron. I set off home but changed my mind when I realized it wasn’t the best moment to run into Lia. Eventually I went to the laboratory.
I felt so guilty about allowing myself to be talked into giving her the passport that I locked myself in for two days and didn’t open the door for anyone, didn’t set foot in our apartment, didn’t answer the phone; it even took me a great effort to get out of bed. It was no use telling myself she’d followed her ideals to the very end, that she would certainly not have wanted to die in any other way—I was too moved by her death to accept it rationally. And then it wasn’t one of the most glorious periods of the revolution. There was still the Cuban example, of course, but what could one say about Fidel Castro and his alignment with Moscow? Everyone who came back from the island said that the time of celebration and hope was over. The watch kept on sexual morality, the restrictions on individual freedoms, the repression and the censorship were ominous signs. The model island was no longer as great as it had been. Since I would never see Jeannette again, since I found mourning difficult, I was suddenly overcome with doubt. Should I continue my activities, yes or no? Was it not time now to give it all up?
But only a few weeks later the Mexican demonstrations of 1968 ended in a bloodbath. In cold blood, the police fired on hundreds of students; the newspapers were talking of over three hundred deaths in a few hours and as many arrests. These events swept away all my doubts in one stroke. That was just the kind of thing I was fighting against.
The following week Mattéi came to the laboratory with a model Mexican passport to be copied in large numbers. Hundreds of wanted people had been forced to flee, and he was already getting down to organizing the accommodation network. We were going to open wide the gates of Europe and freedom for them.
1. Paris-Presse, February 1960.
2. ‘Redfoot’, the term for left-wingers who went to Algeria after independence, was used in opposition to the term ‘pied-noir’ (blackfoot), meaning the French who had settled in Algeria. [MM]
3. An Algerian revolutionary who became the first president of Algeria. [MM]
4. Office de radiodiffusion télévision française, the French state broad
casting service. [MM]
14
BY 1969 IT WAS SIX YEARS since I’d been making forged papers for Curiel’s network and the OLAS countries through Mattéi, and I hardly need to add that a certain routine had been established. The requests came when they came, in little packages of ten, fifteen, sometimes a lot more, sometimes nothing for a while: identity cards, passports, driver’s licenses, certificates, all kinds of documents—the daily round.
I was going through what you could call a calm period when, one summer’s day, Annette Roger came knocking at the laboratory door together with one of her friends.
Annette and I had had a great rapport ever since the day when she’d persuaded me to meet Francis Jeanson. During the Algerian war she was one of the first victims of the wave of arrests that broke up the Jeanson network. Arrested along with the head of the FLN for the Marseilles region at the end of 1959, Annette was pregnant when she was locked up in Baumettes Prison awaiting trial. As she was a doctor, she took advantage of the complicity of some of the medical staff. A fellow doctor switched her tests and those of a patient who was seriously ill before submitting them to the specialist, who decided Annette should be temporarily released. Her trial had already begun, and she was well aware of what awaited her because the first verdicts of the Paris trials had just been returned, condemning her comrades to ten years in prison, and she made her escape doubled up in the trunk of a car, clutching her stomach to protect it from the jolts. She made it to Switzerland, then to Italy and finally Tunis, where she joined the Tunisian network of the FLN and became a psychiatrist for the Armée de libération nationale (ALN, National Liberation Army). Sentenced in her absence, she got ten years like the others. Once Algeria was independent, she was given very responsible posts in the Algerian Ministry of Health, where she worked for a number of years.
The last time she’d been to the laboratory, panting and in a hurry “between two urgent matters,” the Soviet army had just invaded Czechoslovakia, putting a final end to “socialism with a human face” during the Prague Spring. She wanted to know if I was ready to help some of the reformers, who were in danger of being imprisoned and killed, to flee the country. Of course I said yes.
This time Annette’s request was about the Greeks fighting against the dictatorship of the colonels. Jacqueline Verdeau, the woman who’d come with her, was asking for material aid for her resistance group in Greece. The coup d’état had taken place in 1967, and since then the regime had punished any kind of opposition severely. The rumors of censorship, persecution, imprisonment, deportation and torture were confirmed. Greece had recently been excluded from the Council of Europe, and numerous demonstrations of support and for the defense of human rights had been organized all over the world. I’d been astonished that for the last two years I had only had a small number of Greek documents to forge for the Curiel network.
“Until today we relied on a supply of forged documents from England, but they’re no longer available,” Jacqueline explained.
Jacqueline, a psychiatrist at Saint-Anne Hospital, was approaching forty and her smooth, round face immediately drew me to her. Nervously, she brushed back a lock of her fringe before going on: “It’s become impossible to continue with any anti-government operations, and we’re concerned about the safety of those on the wanted list.”
Usually I didn’t like to have too many different things on at once, nor to work for several organizations at the same time, but since it was only a matter of small quantities, I accepted.
The Greek ID cards were covered with a softer gelatin than the current plastic coating for documents. If you tried to take off the plastic cover to change the details on the card or attach a new photo, the entire board would come away with it. It was better to make the whole card from scratch. I’d already studied all the technical characteristics, so I could start as soon as she wanted. I agreed with Jacqueline that she would carry the ID cards in an ordinary woman’s handbag that was big enough and in which I would sew two extra linings, a soft one with a stiff one underneath that would conceal the number of cards required. She would do as many return journeys to Athens as necessary, and we would proceed in the same way each time.
A few days later Jacqueline took off for Athens with six cards in the lining for a start. Precisely two days after Jacqueline left, I had an unexpected visit from Roland Dumas. He was accompanied by a law student. Stéphanie was very beautiful and she knew it. Silent, her hands stuck in the pockets of her jeans, she looked bored while Roland and I exchanged a few mutual memories. When she started to speak, her expression suddenly became animated. She talked quickly, in a clear, assured voice. Her comrades, a very active Greek resistance group, had commissioned her to find a forger as quickly as possible. Their usual supply route, in England, had just been cut off.
The principal task of Stéphanie’s network was to organize escapes from the country through the Franco-Hellenic Association for Freedom in Greece, and their work had been halted in the same way as Jacqueline’s by the arrest of the English forger. Stéphanie didn’t just need ID cards but passports as well, and this time it wasn’t just a matter of small quantities…
The following week it was the turn of Aurélie, Nathalie’s babysitter from the time when I was living with Marie-Aline, to visit me. On the doorstep she ran into Mattéi, who had come to pass on a new request for Greek passports for Curiel. I felt genuine pleasure at seeing Aurélie again. The energetic woman with the flowing black mane standing before me completely swept away the image of the sad, timid adolescent I’d known ten years before. At the time Aurélie had told us she’d run away because of great family problems.
Marie-Aline and I took her under our wing, and I applied to be declared her legal guardian so that she wouldn’t be sent back to the man who’d been beating her. The social services put her officially in my care.
Aurélie, who lived with me until she came of age, and even a little longer, during the years when I was making documents for the FLN, had eventually realized that it wasn’t only photographs that were produced in the Rue des Jeûneurs lab. However, we never talked about it, and Aurélie kept out of it on her own initiative. Except for one evening when, seeing me about to collapse under the mass of work, she suggested she help me. It was the night before I made my escape to Belgium. We spent the whole night printing out the plates for Swiss documents that would be the network’s reserve while the Brussels lab was being set up.
Aurélie was in great form. With roars of laugher she described her new life to me, happy to be able to tell me that she was working as a film editor for the cinema, which was what she’d always wanted to do. She was living with a man, Nicolas, whom she wanted to introduce to me but, snowed under with work as I was, I suggested we put the meeting off until the next month.
“But it’s urgent!” she broke in.
For a moment I had the ridiculous notion that she wanted my support as an ‘adoptive father’, but Aurélie’s urgent request was of a quite different nature.
Nicolas, the man she was living with, was a Greek revolutionary who’d come to Paris to study a few years previously and now divided his time between his work as a stage designer and the Greek Youth Resistance movement of which he was a passionate supporter. Nicolas, it seemed, had a favor to ask of me…
So that was how things around me were suddenly becoming hectic. All at once everyone wanted Greek documents. During the months that followed one client would leave the lab only for another to come in. I have to tell you that, as well as the Greek turmoil, I couldn’t avoid having other friends, former members of the Jeanson network, coming to beg me to help them. Struggles were going on all over the world, and many of those who had supported the FLN felt, like me, that they owed a duty to the oppressed. It was a mad scramble; the knocking at my door was never-ending. For example there was the filmmaker, Mario Marret, for whom I supplied the film and necessary papers to make his documentary Nossa Terra in the bush of Guinea-Bissau with the rebels of the African Party for t
he Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (APIGCV). I was already making forged papers for the APIGCV through Mattéi, but when Mario came to the laboratory again he brought with him the brother of Amílcar Cabral, the leader of the rebellion, a half-caste called Luís Cabral who in 1974, after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the death of Amílcar, would become the first president of Guinea-Bissau.
As he’d left the country illegally, Luís had to acquire new papers and find secure accommodation at once. I saw to everything, and that was the beginning of a long collaboration between us that was to make it possible for senior officials of the movement to travel around Europe. After Luís came João. And so on. I won’t name them all—it would take too long—but while I’d been very careful all my life to avoid multiple contacts, within one year I found I’d ended up with more than a dozen clients at the same time.
Following the rule of keeping everything in separate watertight compartments, it was absolutely essential that no one should find out that I was working for other people—they should all believe they were ‘the only one’—so, as far as humanly possible, I organized things so that they wouldn’t meet each other. It still happened that I couldn’t avoid two of them sitting in the waiting room at the same time, but I was sure each took the other for a normal client.
I had moved from an ordered routine to being run off my feet. Having multiple clients increased not only the amount of work but the risk as well. The least gesture, word, journey demanded extreme vigilance. I numbered the boxes with the orders then hid them among other, identical boxes containing photographic paper and proofs. The Dumas-Stéphanie box was no. 22, the Annette-Jacqueline box 78, the Aurélie-Nico box 43, etc.
Even though M. Petit, who arrived at nine in the morning every day and left at five, as regular as clockwork, never set foot outside his office, I now always kept my bundle of keys on me and made sure I locked the door of every room in the laboratory behind me. Since my clients weren’t normal ‘customers’ and their requests not the kind of thing you write down in an order book, I had to put everything in code and retain it by memory—for when, for whom, how many—without ever getting mixed up.
Adolfo Kaminsky Page 17