Adolfo Kaminsky’s talent for forging realistic documents helped children, their parents and others escape deportation to concentration camps during WWII. His expertise enabled him to erase Jewish-sounding

names like Abraham or Isaac from ID and food ration cards, and substitute gentile-sounding names. He died Jan. 9 at his home in Paris. He was 97.

He continued to forge documents for three decades after the war, aiding insurgents in British-mandate Palestine, French Algeria, South Africa and Latin America. He finally gave up the forger’s life in the early 1970s, and went on to earn a living as a photographer, shooting evocative scenes like rain-slicked cobblestones and nighttime lovers on a bench far removed from the tumult of war.