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Translator: federica bonaldi Reviewer: Thomas VANDENBOGAERDE
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I am the daughter of a forger,
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not just any forger ...
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When you hear the word "forger," you often understand "mercenary."
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You understand "forged currency," "forged pictures."
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My father is no such man.
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For 30 years of his life,
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he made false papers --
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never for himself, always for other people,
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and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed.
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Let me introduce him.
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Here is my father at age 19.
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It all began for him during World War II,
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when at age 17 he found himself thrust
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into a forged documents workshop.
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He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance.
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And it's not a banal story --
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after the liberation he continued
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to make false papers until the '70s.
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When I was a child
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I knew nothing about this, of course.
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This is me in the middle making faces.
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I grew up in the Paris suburbs
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and I was the youngest of three children.
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I had a "normal" dad like everybody else,
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apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ...
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well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather.
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Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator,
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and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly.
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And, of course, he never talked about his past life
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when he was a forger.
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There was, however, an incident I'm going to tell you about,
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that perhaps could have led me suspect something.
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I was in high school and got a bad grade,
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a rare event for me,
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so I decided to hide it from my parents.
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In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature.
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I started working on my mother's signature,
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because my father's is absolutely impossible to forge.
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So, I got working. I took some sheets of paper
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and started practicing, practicing, practicing,
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until I reached what I thought was a steady hand,
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and went into action.
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Later, while checking my school bag,
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my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged.
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She yelled at me like she never had before.
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I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets,
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and then I waited for my father to come back from work
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with, one could say, much apprehension.
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I heard him come in.
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I remained under the blankets. He entered my room,
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sat on the corner of the bed,
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and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head,
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and when he saw me he started laughing.
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He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand.
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Then he said, "But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder! Can't you see it's really too small?"
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Indeed, it's rather small.
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I was born in Algeria.
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There I would hear people say my father was a "moudjahid"
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and that means "fighter."
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Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations,
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and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life,
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especially that he had "done" World War II,
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that he had "done" the Algerian war.
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And in my head I would be thinking that "doing" a war meant being a soldier.
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But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent,
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I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun.
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And indeed, I was very far from the mark.
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One day, while my father was working on a file
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for us to obtain French nationality,
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I happened to see some documents
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that caught my attention.
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These are real!
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These are mine, I was born an Argentinean.
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But the document I happened to see
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that would help us build a case for the authorities
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was a document from the army
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that thanked my father for his work
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on behalf of the secret services.
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And then, suddenly, I went "wow!"
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My father, a secret agent?
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It was very James Bond.
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I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer.
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And later, I told myself that
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one day I would have to question him.
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And then I became a mother and had a son,
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and finally decided it was time -- that he absolutely had to talk to us.
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I had become a mother
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and he was celebrating his 77th birthday,
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and suddenly I was very, very afraid.
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I feared he'd go
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and take his silences with him,
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and take his secrets with him.
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I managed to convince him that it was important for us,
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but possibly also for other people
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that he shared his story.
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He decided to tell it to me
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and I made a book,
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from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later.
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So, his story. My father was born in Argentina.
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His parents were of Russian descent.
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The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s.
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His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor.
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So at the age of 14 my father had to work.
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And with his only diploma,
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his primary education certificate,
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he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner.
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That's where he discovered something totally magical,
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and when he talks about it, it's fascinating --
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it's the magic of dyeing chemistry.
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During that time the war was happening
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and his mother was killed when he was 15.
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This coincided with the time when
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he threw himself body and soul into chemistry
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because it was the only consolation for his sadness.
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All day he would ask many questions to his boss
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to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge,
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and at night, when no one was looking,
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he'd put his experience to practice.
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He was mostly interested in ink bleaching.
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All this to tell you
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that if my father became a forger, actually,
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it was almost by accident.
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His family was Jewish, so they were hounded.
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Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp
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and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers.
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Well, they were out,
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but they were always in danger. The big "Jew" stamp was still on their papers.
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It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents.
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My father had been instilled with such respect for the law
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that although he was being persecuted,
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he'd never thought of false papers.
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But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance.
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In those times documents had hard covers,
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they were filled in by hand,
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and they stated your job.
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In order to survive, he needed
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to be working. He asked the man
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to write "dyer."
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Suddenly the man looked very, very interested.
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As a "dyer," do you know how to bleach ink marks?
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Of course he knew.
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And suddenly the man started explaining that
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actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem:
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even the top experts
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could not manage to bleach an ink, called "indelible,"
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the "Waterman" blue ink.
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And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly
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how to bleach it.
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Now, of course, the man was very impressed with this young man of 17
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who could immediately give him the formula, so he recruited him.
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And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something
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we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case:
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the so-called "correction pen."
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(Applause)
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But it was only the beginning.
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That's my father.
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As soon as he got to the lab,
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even though he was the youngest,
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he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents.
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All the movements stopped at falsifying.
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But demand was ever-growing
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and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents.
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He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch.
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He started a press. He started photoengraving.
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He started making rubber stamps.
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He started inventing all kind of things --
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with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel.
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Anyway, he had to do all this
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because he was completely obsessed with output.
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He had made a simple calculation:
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In one hour he could make 30 forged documents.
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If he slept one hour, 30 people would die.
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This sense of
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responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 --
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and also his guilt for being a survivor,
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since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not --
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stayed with him all his life.
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And this is maybe what explains why, for 30 years,
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he continued to make false papers
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at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices.
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I'd like to talk about those sacrifices,
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because there were many.
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There were obviously financial sacrifices
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because he always refused to be paid.
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To him, being paid would have meant being a mercenary.
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If he had accepted payment,
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he wouldn't be able to say "yes" or "no"
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depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause.
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So he was a photographer by day,
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and a forger by night for 30 years.
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He was broke all of the time.
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Then there were the emotional sacrifices:
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How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets?
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How can one explain what one does at night in the lab, every single night?
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Of course, there was another kind of sacrifice
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involving his family that I understood much later.
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One day my father introduced me to my sister.
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He also explained to me that I had a brother, too,
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and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four,
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and they were 30 years older than me.
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They are both in their sixties now.
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In order to write the book,
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I asked my sister questions. I wanted to know who my father was,
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who was the father she had known.
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She explained that the father that she'd had
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would tell them he'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk.
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They would get all dressed up and wait for him,
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but he would almost never come.
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He'd say, "I'll call." He wouldn't call.
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And then he would not come.
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Then one day he totally disappeared.
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Time passed,
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and they thought he had surely forgotten them,
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at first.
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Then as time passed,
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at the end of almost two years, they thought,
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"Well, perhaps our father has died."
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And then I understood
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that asking my father so many questions
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was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about
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because it was painful.
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And while my half brother and sister thought they'd been abandoned,
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orphaned,
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my father was making false papers.
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And if he did not tell them, it was of course to protect them.
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After the liberation he made false papers
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to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine
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before the creation of Israel.
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And then, as he was a staunch anti-colonialist,
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he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war.
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After the Algerian war,
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at the heart of the international resistance movements,
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his name circulated
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and the whole world came knocking at his door.
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In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence:
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Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola.
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And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party.
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He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans.
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There was also Latin America.
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My father helped those who resisted dictatorships
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in the Dominican Republic, Haiti,
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and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
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Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico.
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Then there was the Vietnam War.
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My father made false papers for the American deserters
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who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese.
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Europe was not spared either.
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My father made false papers for the dissidents
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against Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal,
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against the colonels' dictatorship in Greece,
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and even in France.
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There, just