Forgery and the fear of the state
I just read a piece by Perry Metzger on how his family's experience makes him wary of ID cards. He writes that his
father was sent to Alsace, but he stayed too long in France and ended up being stuck there after the occupation. If it were not for forged papers, he would have died. [...] Ultimately, he and other members of the family escaped France by "illegally" crossing the border into Switzerland. ([...A] "law" like that [...] would leave you dead if you obeyed.) [...] Anyway, if the governments of the time had actually had access to modern anti-forgery techniques, I might never have been born. To you [contemporary Europeans], ID cards are a nice way to keep things orderly. To me, they are a potential death sentence.
So, the next time one of your friends in Germany asks why the crazy Americans think ID cards and such are a bad thing, remember my father, and remember all the people like him who fled to the US over the last couple hundred years and who left children that still remember such things, whether from China or North Korea or Germany or Spain or Russia or Yugoslavia or Chile or lots of other places.
Another famous forger in the Holocaust era was Raoul Wallenberg, who now has a street in Washington, D.C., named after him.
I'm wondering about forgery and my family in the Holocaust. Many of my family members were refugees, but I don't have information that any of them survived by forging identity documents. However, there is a family story -- which I should investigate further -- that my grandfather saved a number of refugees by committing fraud, not upon the German government, but upon the United States government. Then as now, some immigrants had to have affidavits of support filed for them by U.S. residents. The story goes that my grandfather paid for the passage of a number of Holocaust refugees to the United States, and wanted to complete affidavits of support for them, but did not technically meet the U.S. immigration authorities' criteria to file the affidavits. (Either he didn't have enough money or income, or he wasn't permitted to sponsor so many immigrants in his own name, or something like that.) He therefore committed a deliberate fraud to misrepresent his financial situation and persuade the authorities that he met the sponsorship criteria they had established. The nature of the fraud is a little unclear to me, but I think it was plainly illegal under the immigration rules of the time. The fraud was persuasive and the refugees were admitted (and my grandfather succeeded in finding work for them). It wasn't a fraud with regard to identity documents, but it was a fraud that saved lives.
