The hardest job his group was given was to produce 900 documents, for 300 children, in three days. For two of those, he forced himself to stay awake. He worked until he passed out, then woke and worked again
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskWord had got round that police were looking for a forger. An expert one, who in Vichy France in 1944 was creating identity papers that looked impeccable. They would never suspect him. He was merely a child. When the officer asked what he had in his satchel he said “Sandwiches!” and offered to show him. The man waved him aside and moved on.
Then, with these documents, he saved lives. Each one replaced a Jewish name with a Gentile one, and a far-off birthplace with somewhere close. His own falsecard gave his name as Julien Adolphe Keller and his birthplace not as Buenos Aires, as was the case, but Alsace. With such cards, backed up by forged passports, baptism certificates and birth certificates, around 10,000 Jews were able to escape arrest, which would have meant death in the camps, and find safety.
Yet he was not a natural forger. He obeyed the law absolutely. Before the Metro incident, his tensest moment had been when La Sixième, as an initiation, made him create a newcard for himself. This illegal act so disturbed him that he never forgot the smell of the wooden table where he sat, or the gape of the inkwell. When the law itself was inhuman, however, it had to be fought.
His motivation was simply this: to avoid deaths and save lives. Nothing else. There had been too many corpses. He had been traumatised by the death of his mother, pushed off a train when he was 15, and by a spell in 1943 in Drancy, the holding camp for Auschwitz, where the outcome for most was death but he, with his real Argentine passport, had escaped. Papers could release human beings or doom them; tie them to an identity, or set them free. That responsibility was now his.
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