Adolfo Kaminsky was born on Oct. 1, 1925, in Buenos Aires. His parents, Salomon and Anna (Kinoël) Kaminsky, were Russian Jews who met in Paris in 1916. His mother had fled the pogroms in Russia; his father was a journalist for a Jewish Marxist newspaper. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the czarist government, France expelled sympathizers of the new regime, and the Kaminskys fled to Argentina, where their two other sons were also born. By the early 1930s, the Kaminskys were able to return to France and settle in the town of Vire in Normandy. Adolfo left school at 13 to...