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Remarkable Heroes and Heroines of the French Resistance in World War II

Khalid Elhassan May 12, 2025 18 min

Resistance - Women and men of the French Resistance — Women and men of the French Resistance. Pegasus Battlefield Tours

13. A Teenager in the Resistance

French gendarmes and German military police deporting Jews by bus to the holding camp of Drancy. Yad Vashem

Kaminsky began to read up on chemistry, and took a part time job working for a chemist on the weekend. That came in handy during his subsequent career as a forger. Kaminsky was fifteen-years-old when Germany conquered France in 1940. It did not take long before he and his Jewish family felt the Nazi yoke. Their home was seized early in the occupation to quarter German troops, and the Kaminskys were evicted.

The following year, the Nazis shot Kaminsky’s mother dead. In 1943, the rest of the family was interned in a holding camp, preparatory to deportation to Auschwitz. They were only spared after intervention from the Argentinean consul. By then, sixteen-year-old Kaminsky had joined the French Resistance.

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.