Out Spotlight CVX

Today's Out Spotlight is a leader in the Underground Resistance of WWII and gay Jewish Holocaust survivor, Gad Beck.

Gad Beck was born into a Jewish-Christian family in Germany in 1923, his father was a Jewish immigrant from Austria, his mother having converted when they married. The Becks lived in a poor section of Berlin, populated predominantly by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. When Gad and his twin sister, Miriam, were 5, the Becks moved to the Weissensee district of Berlin, where he entered primary school.

After the Nazi's rise to power, he and his sister were labeled half-Jewlish and experienced growing anti-semitism. The harassment became so intolerable that he convinced his parents to send him to a Jewish boys' school in 1934.

"I was just 10 when the Nazis came to power. As one of a small number of Jewish pupils in my school, I quickly became the target of antisemitic comments: 'Can I sit somewhere else, not next to Gad? He has such stinking Jewish feet.' In 1934 my parents enrolled me in a Jewish school, but I had to quit school when I was 12 as they could no longer afford the tuition. I found work as a shop assistant."

Beck had his first male-male sexual experience while at school, seducing a sports teacher. He proudly boasted about his conquest to his mother, with a frankness that became typical for him. Hardly surprised, his parents accepted his homosexuality.

In 1941, Beck, then eighteen years old, joined "Chug Chaluzi," an underground Jewish resistance group in Berlin that organized hiding places and food for Jews.

"As the child of a mixed marriage [Mischlinge], I was not deported to the east when other German Jews were. I remained in Berlin where I became involved in the underground, helping Jews to escape to Switzerland. As a homosexual, I was able to turn to my trusted non-Jewish, homosexual acquaintances to help supply food and hiding places. In early 1945 a Jewish spy for the Gestapo betrayed me and a number of my underground friends. I was interned in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin."

In 1942, Beck tried to liberate his great love Manfred Lewin from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. His dangerous charade was successful, but as they walked away, Manfred told Gad he could not abandon his family. He watched helplessly as his lover was taken back to the transfer camp and later killed in Auschwitz. This was the last time he would see Manfred, who left behind a journal of his brief life.

Manfred had recorded the turbolent times of his youth in this 17-page small, hand-made book that he gave to Gad just before being deported. The booklet illustrates the daily life of the two lovers, their youth group, and the culture in which they lived. Beck donated the precious booklet to the United States Holocaust Museum, in 1999.

As a “half-breed” by Nazi-standards Beck and his twin sister Miriam were interned at Rosenstrasse-camp in the centre of Berlin in 1943, but set free again after unique street-protests by non-Jewish relatives and friends.

In 1944, Beck became head of his resistance group. As a leader Beck helped to organize the survival of many Jews in Berlin during the last two years of World War II until he and his friends were finally caught and was imprisoned when the group was betrayed and turned over to the Getaspo, shortly before the Russian troops liberated Berlin.

After the war, Beck went to Munich, Germany and worked with Ben-Gurion in the displaced persons camps, counting survivors and preparing them for emigration to Palestine. He emigrated to Israel in 1947 together with his lover. In 1979, he returned to Berlin to work with the head of the German Jewish community, Heinz Galinski and became a vocal gay activist throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Beck shared his story in the powerful documentary Paragraph 175 (2000) as well as writing a book about about his life, called An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin.

The rights to Beck’s autobiography have been optioned by Steven Spielberg.

Rather than having suffered from the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi-Germany Gad Beck believes his homosexuality had given him the strength and power to go into resistance and organize his own and other people’s survival.



An Underground Life

Documentary: Paragraph 175