Sorry, I’m sure I sound abysmally negative in a celebratory moment, but it’s important to know that UC admin have fought us every step of the way as we attempted to stand up for our university. It’s become very clear to many of us that they view the values we cherish as impediments to their work.

And today, I honor the memory of my Uncle Mony, his crew mates, and their Belgian resistance friends, for everything they put on the line. These people fought fascists. 31/end

The courage and simple humanity of the Vos family and the Alterman sisters resonates down through the years to today. My family is forever grateful to them for the risks they took, and the example they provide, for how to live. 30/x

During these 8 months, my grandparents Max and Irene and my mother Betty did not know if their son and brother was alive or dead. It was only when he returned to London for his intelligence debriefing that the US Army Air Force sent a telegram to let them know. 29/x

Here are the Alterman sisters, their dog Flicka, and airmen Lester Smith, Bob Walther, Don Dahlin, Gerald Miller, my uncle, and Paul Herring. Miller and Herring had flown with 2 different crews and with assistance from the Belgian resistance had made their way to the Alterman's house. 28/x

At the Alterman's home, Mony was reunited with the 3 other crew mates who'd escaped and evaded capture - Walther, Smith, and Dahlin. They were hidden by the Altermans for 8 months, February to September 1944, when the US First Army liberated western Belgium from Nazi rule. 27/x

My uncle was then moved by the resistance via horse and cart 30 kilometers to the village of Blaregnies, Belgium, close to the French border. Two sisters, Julia and Adelie Alterman, members of the resistance, took him in. 26/x

Here is a picture of Nan, her mother Renee, along with Louisa Vos and her daughter Renee. The two daughters remained friends their entire lives. 25/x

Fortunately, the Germans never looked up. Mony and Nan were safe. 24/x

"At the barn, we climbed the ladder” and pulled it up behind them. “After a while,” she wrote, “the barn door opened, and some armed Germans entered” and stabbed “the hay sheaves scattered on the ground floor of the barn” with their bayonets. “We hid without almost daring to breathe" 23/x.

Now, with the Germans on their way, she went with Uncle Mony to the barn. "He was very tired and his leg and chest hurt him and he was also very worried about being discovered in civilian clothes," she later wrote 22/x

"I was the only one to speak and understand a little English and I managed to make him understand that he was with friends who were going to take care of him.” 21/x

Many years later, Nan recounted what happened when my Uncle Mony parachuted into her life: “When I saw him, I realized that the man in uniform was an American
airman and I must admit that I threw myself into his arms to kiss him.” 20/x

With a German military unit on the way, the Vos family needed to hide both my uncle, and especially Renee and Nan. The Germans were killing the men found harboring Allied crewmen or Jews and shipping the women to concentration camps in the east. Everything was at stake. 19/x

Before the war ended, the Vos family arranged for 17 members of the Miliband family to be sheltered and hidden throughout the village of Montignies-lez-Lens. In September 2024, they were recognized as "righteous gentiles” by Yad Vashem. 18/x