← Back to the front page

Historic Figures Who Set Out to Save Jews From the Holocaust

Khalid Elhassan December 15, 2020 32 min

Hanns Albin Rauter - World War II — A Dutch Resistance cell during WWII. For God and Country

12. A Display of Chemistry Skill Set This Teenager on a Forgery Career

When Germany conquered France in 1940, Adolphe Kaminsky was fifteen-years-old. It did not take long before he and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. The Kaminsky home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and the Kaminskys were evicted. The following year, the Nazis shot Adolphe’s mother dead, without the teenager being able to do anything to save her. In 1943, his family was interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only spared after intervention from the Argentinean consul.

By then, Adolphe had joined the French Resistance at age sixteen. Sent by his father to pick up forged identity papers from a Resistance cell, he discovered that they had trouble removing a particular dye. The precocious chemist gave them a solution off the top of his head that immediately solved their problem. Impressed, the Resistance recruited him and put him to work in an underground laboratory in Paris.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.