Full Name Gerhard Beck Name Gad Beck Citizenship German Role Educator | Years active 1947–2012 Home town Berlin Religion Jewish Siblings Margot Beck | |
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Born 30 June 1923 ( 1923-06-30 ) Berlin, Germany Occupation Educator, activist, author Known for Last gay Holocaust survivor Partner(s) Julius Laufer
(1977–2012; his death) Died June 24, 2012, Berlin, Germany Books An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin Parents Heinrich Beck, Hedwig Beck Nominations Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Biography/Autobiography | ||
Curator Discusses Handmade Book Donated by Gay Holocaust Survivor
Gerhard "Gad" Beck (30 June 1923 – 24 June 2012) was an Israeli-German educator, author, activist, and survivor of the Holocaust.
Contents
Life and career
Beck was born Gerhard Beck in Berlin, Germany, along with twin sister Margot, the son of Hedwig (née Kretschmar) and Heinrich Beck. His father was born Jewish, and his German mother, originally a Protestant, had converted to Judaism. The family lived in a predominantly Jewish immigrant section of the city. At age five, he and his family moved to the Weissensee district where he attended primary school and was the target of antisemitism from classmates. In 1934, he was enrolled in a Jewish school but had to quit and take a job as a shop attendant.
As a person of partial Jewish ancestry (a Mischling in Nazi terminology), Beck was not deported with other German Jews. Instead, he remained in Berlin. He recalls in his autobiography borrowing a neighbor’s Hitler Youth uniform and marching into the pre-deportation camp where his lover, Manfred Lewin, had been arrested and detained. He asked the commanding officer for the boy's release for use in a construction project, and it was granted. When outside the building; however, the boy declined, saying, "Gad, I can't go with you. My family needs me. If I abandon them now, I could never be free." With that, the two parted without saying goodbye. "In those seconds, watching him go," Gad recalls, "I grew up." Lewin and his entire family were murdered at Auschwitz.
Beck joined an underground effort to supply food and hiding places to Jews escaping to neutral Switzerland. In early 1945, a Jewish spy for the Gestapo betrayed him and some of his underground friends. He was subsequently interrogated and interned in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin.
After World War II, Beck helped organize efforts to enable Jewish survivors to emigrate to Palestine, emigrating himself in 1947. Beck returned to Berlin in 1979 where he was the director of the Jewish Adult Education Center in Berlin.
In 2000, Beck was featured, along with a few other gay Holocaust survivors, in the HBO documentary film Paragraph 175 in which he remembers his "great, great love" lost to the Nazis. Also in 2000, the English translation of Beck's 1995 autobiography, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, was published, leading to a successful book tour through the United States. Making a documentary film on his life Gad has been proposed.
Beck died on June 24, 2012, in a Berlin retirement home at the age of 88. He was the last known gay survivor of the Holocaust.
