Life
Salomon Smolianoff was born to a Jewish family in Kremenchuk, Ukraine. He studied painting in Russia, but he had to leave the country in 1922 because his parents were on the wrong side of the Russian Revolution. He went across Europe, was married in Italy, and finally tried to start a new life in Germany, where he met a counterfeiter and decided to become one himself. He was wanted by several European police forces prior to the outbreak of World War II. In 1939 Bernhard Krüger, future SS Sturmbannführer head of Operation Bernhard, put him behind bars. He was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and made himself useful to the S.S. guards as a portraitist and artist. He was selected for Operation Bernhard, transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944, and eventually to the Ebensee site of the Mauthausen camp network, where he was liberated by the US Army on 6 May 1945. All traces of the master counterfeiter Smolianoff were lost after his liberation. He was soon on international "Wanted" lists as a counterfeiter, but he is also believed to have forged emigration papers for Jews trying to go to Palestine.
He then emigrated to Uruguay, where he counterfeited Russian icons. The Uruguayan police apparently caught on, and Smolianoff moved to Brazil in the 1950s, where he went into the toy business.
Smolianoff died in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil, in 1976. He allegedly spent his last years painting portraits and creating toys.
Read more about this topic: Salomon Smolianoff
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with people being happy, but there’s more to life than turning on and screwing to Ravel’s Bolero.”
—Blake Edwards (b. 1922)
“If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)