I am the daughter of a forger,

not just any forger ...

When you hear the word "forger," you often understand "mercenary."

You understand "forged currency," "forged pictures."

My father is no such man.

For 30 years of his life,

he made false papers --

never for himself, always for other people,

and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed.

Let me introduce him.

Here is my father at age 19.

It all began for him during World War II,

when at age 17 he found himself thrust

into a forged documents workshop.

He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance.

And it's not a banal story --

after the liberation he continued

to make false papers until the '70s.

When I was a child

I knew nothing about this, of course.

This is me in the middle making faces.

I grew up in the Paris suburbs

and I was the youngest of three children.

I had a "normal" dad like everybody else,

apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ...

well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather.

Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator,

and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly.

And, of course, he never talked about his past life

when he was a forger.

There was, however, an incident I'm going to tell you about,

that perhaps could have led me suspect something.

I was in high school and got a bad grade,

a rare event for me,

so I decided to hide it from my parents.

In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature.

I started working on my mother's signature,

because my father's is absolutely impossible to forge.

So, I got working. I took some sheets of paper

and started practicing, practicing, practicing,

until I reached what I thought was a steady hand,

and went into action.

Later, while checking my school bag,

my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged.

She yelled at me like she never had before.

I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets,

and then I waited for my father to come back from work

with, one could say, much apprehension.

I heard him come in.

I remained under the blankets. He entered my room,

sat on the corner of the bed,

and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head,

and when he saw me he started laughing.

He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand.

Then he said, "But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder! Can't you see it's really too small?"

Indeed, it's rather small.

I was born in Algeria.

There I would hear people say my father was a "moudjahid"

and that means "fighter."

Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations,

and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life,

especially that he had "done" World War II,

that he had "done" the Algerian war.

And in my head I would be thinking that "doing" a war meant being a soldier.

But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent,

I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun.

And indeed, I was very far from the mark.

One day, while my father was working on a file

for us to obtain French nationality,

I happened to see some documents

that caught my attention.

These are real!

These are mine, I was born an Argentinean.

But the document I happened to see

that would help us build a case for the authorities

was a document from the army

that thanked my father for his work

on behalf of the secret services.

And then, suddenly, I went "wow!"

My father, a secret agent?

It was very James Bond.

I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer.

And later, I told myself that

one day I would have to question him.

And then I became a mother and had a son,

and finally decided it was time -- that he absolutely had to talk to us.

I had become a mother

and he was celebrating his 77th birthday,

and suddenly I was very, very afraid.

I feared he'd go

and take his silences with him,

and take his secrets with him.

I managed to convince him that it was important for us,

but possibly also for other people

that he shared his story.

He decided to tell it to me

and I made a book,

from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later.

So, his story. My father was born in Argentina.

His parents were of Russian descent.

The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s.

His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor.

So at the age of 14 my father had to work.

And with his only diploma,

his primary education certificate,

he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner.

That's where he discovered something totally magical,

and when he talks about it, it's fascinating --

it's the magic of dyeing chemistry.

During that time the war was happening

and his mother was killed when he was 15.

This coincided with the time when

he threw himself body and soul into chemistry

because it was the only consolation for his sadness.

All day he would ask many questions to his boss

to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge,

and at night, when no one was looking,

he'd put his experience to practice.

He was mostly interested in ink bleaching.

All this to tell you

that if my father became a forger, actually,

it was almost by accident.

His family was Jewish, so they were hounded.

Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp

and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers.

Well, they were out,

but they were always in danger. The big "Jew" stamp was still on their papers.

It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents.

My father had been instilled with such respect for the law

that although he was being persecuted,

he'd never thought of false papers.

But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance.

In those times documents had hard covers,

they were filled in by hand,

and they stated your job.

In order to survive, he needed

to be working. He asked the man

to write "dyer."

Suddenly the man looked very, very interested.

As a "dyer," do you know how to bleach ink marks?

Of course he knew.

And suddenly the man started explaining that

actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem:

even the top experts

could not manage to bleach an ink, called "indelible,"

the "Waterman" blue ink.

And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly

how to bleach it.

Now, of course, the man was very impressed with this young man of 17

who could immediately give him the formula, so he recruited him.

And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something

we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case:

the so-called "correction pen."

(Applause)

But it was only the beginning.

That's my father.

As soon as he got to the lab,

even though he was the youngest,

he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents.

All the movements stopped at falsifying.

But demand was ever-growing

and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents.

He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch.

He started a press. He started photoengraving.

He started making rubber stamps.

He started inventing all kind of things --

with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel.

Anyway, he had to do all this

because he was completely obsessed with output.

He had made a simple calculation:

In one hour he could make 30 forged documents.

If he slept one hour, 30 people would die.

This sense of

responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 --