Konrad Kujau was born in June 1938 in the Saxony region of Germany. His childhood was marked by war and poverty. His father, a simple cobbler, was a fervent supporter of Hitler, like many Germans at the time. When he died in 1944, the family found themselves in terrible poverty. In 1945, during the bombing of Dresden, the last members of the family were dispersed. Thereafter, Konrad grew up in various orphanages in East Germany...

Ceslaw Bojarski was a quiet, discreet man, born in Poland in the winter of 1912. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Dantzing and then, he became an officer in the Polish army during the Second World War. Taken prisoner by the Hungarians, he escaped and took refuge in France. There, he was re-enlisted in the First Polish Division...

Joyce Hatto was born on September 5th, 1928 in Saint John's Wood, London. As a pianist, she performed on various stages, but was expelled from the Royal Academy of London. She wandered from small concerts in England to recitals. She taught for a few years at Crofton Grange, a boarding school for girls in Hertfordshire, north of London. The critics attending her performances judged her mediocre. They even expressed doubts about her ability to play Mozart or Rachmaninoff...

Born in Paris in 1797, Maximilien-Théodore Chrétin was a student of the painter Guérin and the engraver Simon Pradier. First a sailor, then a paper maker, he was a drawing teacher at the College of Auch. A canal was discovered in Nérac in the Garenne park in 1832. Excavations, subsidized by the State, were then organized and the remains of a Gallo-Roman villa and numerous mosaics were unearthed. It was only natural that the city councilor of Nérac, Mr. Lespiault, entrusted the supervision of the excavation site to his local expert, Maximilien-Théodore Chrétin. The artist exhumed a dozen inscriptions and medallions dealing with the Roman emperor Tetricus, his wife (until now unknown) and his son. Except that, in 1834, the Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres declared these inscriptions to be false...

Jack the Ripper. It's a name that makes one shudder. To some, Jack is a fictional character who never really existed. To others, he represents the most interesting police mystery in the history of criminology. The murders of prostitutes in 1888 attributed to Jack the Ripper are real, as is the mystery that surrounds them. With so much uncertainty, it is easy to understand why, a century later, Michael Barrett's so-called revelations took on such importance. Michael Barrett is said to be the author of the "original Jack the Ripper diary"...

During the Second World War and for 30 more years afterwards, Adolfo Kaminsky, born in Argentina on October 1st, 1925, was a forger. Not for money, not for glory, not to denounce a corrupt system, but to save lives, with equality between men as his guiding rule....

Of Rudy's childhood, we know absolutely nothing, except that he was born in Djakarta in 1976 under the name Zhen Wang Huang. At the age of 24, he shows up at a store in California, called Cellar Door Fine Wines with a bottle of wine in his hand, a 1998 Cabernet. He explains to Kyle Smith, the co-founder of the store, that it is not to his taste and he wants to sell it. From there, a friendship built around the love of wine is born...

Pei-Shen Qian, born in China in 1950, is recognized as a full-fledged artist in his home country, where he has exhibited portraits of Mao since the 1970s and taught painting. But Pei-Shen also likes abstract art, and the government in Beijing does not approve of this style, which they consider decadent. So Pei-Shen immigrates to the United States on a student visa in 1981 and settles in Queens, New York. He studies at the Arts Student League with abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. However, he does not enjoy the same success as in his native country.