You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. This week we have another reading from the LRB archive.

Adam Schatz, the paper's U.S. editor, is reading his piece from February this year on the photographer

and French resistance forger Adolfo Kaminsky.

In the spring of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétanist Milis outside

the Saint-Germain-Dé-Pret metro station.

According to his identity card, he was Julian Keller, age 17, a dyer, born in the Departement

of the Creuse.

The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers,

but he was confident that the police had no idea how frightened he was,

because he'd learned to affect an air of serenity.

I also knew, with certainty, that my papers were in order,

he recalled many years later. After all,

I was the one who had made them.

Julianne Keller was the Nonde-de-Garere of Adolfo Kaminsky, who died in Paris on the 9th of January,

2003 at the age of 97. It was largely thanks to him that the German occupied zone of wartime

France was flooded with false documents. The occupation authorities were on his trail,

but they never suspected that the forger they were after was a teenager. He was actually 18,

but claimed to be a year younger to avoid conscription

into the compulsory work service. Kaminsky worked out of a laboratory on the Rue des Saint-Père,

disguised as an artist's studio. Housed in a tiny attic, it belonged to the sixth, a secret section of the General Union of

Israelites of France, an organization the Vichy regime had set up and financed with money and property

confiscated from Jews. The UGIF pretended to be a humanitarian outfit, but would be instrumental in organizing the deportation of the Jewish population.

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