As I discussed in my last post, resisters sometimes got lost in the confusion of war because their aliases worked so well. There were also cases in which a resister accomplished so much and became so well-known by his or her wartime pseudonym that the false name became part of the resister’s postwar identity.

For example, several Frenchmen hyphenated their last names, adding their resistance name to their family name. The dashing First World War veteran and partisan leader Henri Petit, who harassed the Germans during the Second World War under the name Romans, changed his name to Henri Romans-Petit after the war. It was undoubtedly easier than trying to get everyone to remember that “Romans” was not really the name of the famous hero. In other cases, Frenchmen with political ambitions attached their well-known noms de guerre to their surnames because having Resistance credentials leant a man a certain moral authority in postwar politics.

No one in Dutch-Paris hyphenated his or her name after the war, but one man did use his wartime alias as a nickname for the rest of this life. This was Moen, Weidner’s trusted lieutenant. Despite being Jewish himself, he circulated constantly through occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands, never taking a break in Switzerland. He carried compromising documents and guided fugitives to the Spanish and Swiss borders. Everywhere he went, he encouraged his colleagues. He was known for his wit and his impressive ability to find a good dinner despite rationing. The fugitives in his care trusted him implicitly.

After the war everyone kept calling him Moen. It’s not clear if he asked them to or if they couldn’t imagine him by any other name than the one that had meant so much to them during the war. His friends’ children even called him Uncle Moen.