Adolfo Kaminsky, The Forger of Paris
By Sarah Kaminsky
Translated by Mike Mitchell
Photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky

As seen on 60 MINUTES with ANDERSON COOPER

Expanded edition. Photo introduction by Paul Salmona, Director of the Museum of Jewish Art and History (MAHJ)
Commentary by Deborah Dash Moore

288 pages with 60 black and white photographs.
2025. Paperback and ebook.
$32.95 | 9781954600997 (pb)
$49.95 | 9781954600980 (hc)

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Cover art featuring photographs and forgeries by Adolfo Kaminsky.

“[An] in-depth study of Kaminsky’s second career comes with Deborah Dash Moore’s new essay [that…] examines Kaminsky’s photographs of the 1940’s and ’50s. It’s a fine appreciation fo their quiet, moody, evocative appeal and a superb rounding out of this new edition.”
—Manuscripts Society

Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life
By Sarah Kaminsky
Translated by Mike Mitchell

256 pages with 28 black and white photographs.
2016. Hardcover and paperback.
OUT OF PRINT

The gripping true story of a Jewish teenager who became “The Forger of Paris” for the French Resistance. 

At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Because of his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.

The legacy of Adolfo Kaminsky was revealed in a 2016 New York Times documentary that received a prestigious Emmy and World Press photo award. Then, Kaminsky was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes in 2017. In 2019-2020, an exhibition of his photography at the MAHJ in Paris garnered wide attention. He spoke to an overflowing auditorium in what would be his last public appearance. When Kaminsky died at 97 in 2023, many people across the world mourned. His courage and heroism continue to be celebrated. The photographer who lived in the shadows is now shown in the true light of history.

“At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring.”
– Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia, and Pamela Druckerman
Watch the Emmy award-winning documentary and read the New York Times article.

“Kaminsky’s career as a forger is remarkable by any standard. He served almost every major revolutionary or subversive cause in the world from the upheavals of the 1940s until the end of the turbulent 1960s. […] He was driven by principles, took no payment for his work […] and kept his secret well until the new millennium. Only then did he decide to tell his incredible story, under the gentle prodding of his youngest daughter, actress Sarah Kaminsky. […] The result is a riveting book.”
– Haaretz

More press and praise from around the world.

Documents forged by Adolfo Kaminsky, including his own (lower right – “Julien Keller”).
Photo: Adolfo Kaminsky.

Adolfo Kaminsky and Anderson Cooper in Kaminsky’s Paris apartment, April 2017. Photo © CBS News.

Published with support from the Centre National du Livre and from l’Institut Français.

CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah Kaminsky is a French author, screenwriter, and script doctor born in Algeria. She immigrated to France at the age of three with her father Adolfo Kaminsky, two brothers and her mother Leïla, a Tuareg Algerian law student and anti-colonial activist whose father was a progressive imam. Her 2009 best-selling book about her father, A Forger’s Life, is now translated into fourteen languages. With numerous screenplays and writing credits, she is best known for her comedies in France, as well as recent award-winning films seen around the world, Gauguin Voyage to Tahiti, How to Make a Killing, The Braid, and Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, which has won 19 awards to date at U.S. film festivals. She has a son and lives in Paris.
Photo: Béatrice Cruveiller.

Watch Sarah Kaminsky’s talk at TEDx Paris.

Adolfo Kaminsky (1925–2023), of Russian Jewish origins and carrying an Argentinean passport, made his living in Paris as a photographer in various fields: postcards, advertising photos, and photo reportage while, at the same time, working clandestinely as an unpaid forger for humanitarian causes. He photographed numerous works of art for exhibition catalogs and posters, and he was the regular documentarian for French painters who were precursors of kinetic art such as Antonio Asis, Jesús Rafael Soto, Carmelo Ardenquin, and Yacov Agam. As a specialist for giant-format photography, Adolfo Kaminsky produced film sets for Alexandre Trauner, the set designer for Marcel Carné, René Clair and others. He also took thousands of artistic photographs throughout his life, featured in books (DoppelHouse, Cent Mille Millard) and several exhibitions, including at the Museum of Jewish Art and History (MAHJ). When asked about “the origin of this secret passion, Kaminsky replied shyly, whispering, ‘I had wanted there to be an artist somewhere, voluntarily repressed, because it was important not to be known, nor recognized’,” reported Le Monde in an obituary.

Tributes and articles from around the world appeared in the days following his death, including in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Times of Israel, Forward, The Financial Times, The Economist, Buenos Aires Times, Le Monde (English article here), and a very special appreciation of his artistry in Blind magazine, “The Guardian Angel Photographer.”

Adolfo Kaminsky and Sarah Kaminsky. Photo: Amit Israeli.

Mike Mitchell is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years and recently completed his one hundredth translation. He is the recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations of German works published in Britain, has won the British Comparative Literature Association translation competition twice for translations from German and received a commendation for a translation from French. He has been shortlisted for many awards including the French-American Translation Prize, the Weidenfeld prize, the Aristeion prize, the Kurt Wolff prize, and the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. In 2012, the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture, awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.

Paul Salmona is Director of the Museum of Jewish Art and History (MAHJ) in Paris. He has worked in museums for over forty years. He directed the Louvre auditorium (1992–2005), before creating the direction of cultural development of the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (rescue archaeology) in 2005, which he directed until moving to the MAHJ in 2013. Hispanist by training, he has organized many notable conferences about Jewish life in France and Europe and is the author of Archéologie du judaïsme en France (La Découverte, 2021).

Deborah Dash Moore is an American Jewish historian, author of nine books, and is Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her influential scholarship in the field of modern Jewish history focuses on Jewish urban life, women and gender, the creation of ethnic identity, and Jewish photographers. Her books have regularly garnered awards, including a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent book is Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York (2023). She also serves as Editor in Chief of the ten-volume The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.