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:
“Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.”
—Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
“My life closed twice before its close—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)