Gad Beck was probably the last gay Jewish Holocaust survivor. The former Nazi resistance fighter and long-time activist has now died in Berlin at the age of 89.
An obituary by Frank Heibert
"It's a girl!" the midwife announces happily. The doctor is already leaving when she suddenly calls out: "No, wait, there's something else..."
"Wat" is little Gerhard, the second twin after Margot, a blue baby who gets to breathe properly with a few pats on the bum, into life. "A part of the body that was to become important was probably sensitised right away," the one who entered the world commented later.
The cheeky wit, the self-irony, the zest for life that often goes over the top are typical of Gad Beck, whose first name is Gerhard and who defiantly decides to become Jewish after being called a Jew in the school playground.
The family sticks together anyway, the Christian mother comes from the Oderbruch, the Jewish father from Vienna. They simply celebrate all the festivals, both Christian and Jewish. People are pragmatic in the proletarian barn neighbourhood, even when twelve-year-old Gerhard enthusiastically tells his mother that he has "hugged" the sports teacher: "I thought as much," she replies dryly. It is 1935, and the "mixed-blood family" has long had other worries.
As long as the Nazis were still focussing on forcing the Jews out of their civilian existence, there was an oasis for the boy. Until the end of 1941, the youth group of the Zionist organisation "Hechaluz" was still permitted. Here Gerhard takes the name Gad.
Gad and Manfred become a secret couple, doubly endangered.
It's like the scouts, but the background is serious: they are preparing for a life in Palestine. Gad, outgoing and full of Sturm und Drang, falls in love with Manfred, who plays Don Karlos in the theatre group. Gad is the Marquis of Posa. He has to win Manfred over first, but manages to do so when they spend a weekend with the group camping on the roof of a house and singing songs. Trips into the surrounding countryside are already forbidden. The two become a secret couple, doubly endangered.
In autumn 1941, the deportations of Jews to the East begin. The Jewish community's motto was that families should stay together. Members of the "Hechaluz", one of whom was Gad, decided to go underground.
They are suspicious of the flimsy prospects of working somewhere in Poland; enthusiastic postcards from deportees from Łódź, then Litzmannstadt, make them suspicious: there is talk of large flats - who lived there before, where are the inhabitants now?
When Manfred and his family were taken away at the end of 1942, Gad acted immediately. He borrows his son's HJ uniform, which is too big for him, from Manfred's boss, a master painter, rolls up his sleeves and trouser legs and takes Manfred out of the collection camp in Große Hamburger Straße with an adventurous tall tale: "The Jew has hidden all the keys to the flats where we work".
The SS man says: "But they'll bring him to me again". The blonde Gad in the baggy HJ uniform responds: "What am I supposed to do with a Jew like that?" Three streets further on, Gad wants to give Manfred some money and explain to him where he should hide, Manfred announces that he has to go back to his family: "If I left them now, I could never be free." He says it and turns back.
That's when he grew up, Gad Beck later recounts, repeatedly as a contemporary witness during group tours, on the same street corner in the Scheunenviertel. From that day on, as one of the heads of the underground group "Chug Chaluzi", "Circle of Pioneers", he did everything he could not to lose anyone else. They hid and supported Jews. Hans Rosenthal, who later became famous with "Dalli Dalli", was one of them.
Gad Beck builds up a large network of helpers and secret hiding places
They take them out of the country, supported with money and false passports by the Geneva-based world centre of Hechaluz, which operates through the Swiss embassy, among others. Gad knows he has to work with the "good Aryans", as his youth in the barn district has taught him: among the ordinary people, he always finds some who have their heart in the right place and dare to do something. A whore joins in, many a soldier on home leave, many committed Protestants.
Gad builds up a large network, helpers, secret hiding places, constellations that change on a daily basis, always under threat, first from the Gestapo, then from informers such as the notorious Stella Goldschlag, and finally from the Allied bombs. Gad really will do anything. When he realises that he can win over a potential helper by going to bed with him, he does just that - and the group has a caravan in a leafy colony where another one can be hidden.
A person with weaknesses, desires, anger and willpower
Gad Beck is not a sacrificial lamb or a sterile hero, he is a man with weaknesses, desires, anger and willpower. No wonder that throughout his life he was looked at shyly and ridiculed as a shrill bird by those who feel comfortable with a simple image of victim and hero, and that his book, his account of his life, was better received by the gay community than by the Jewish community or in the high feuilleton.
At the beginning of 1945, he was betrayed and imprisoned in the converted Jewish hospital. Soviet soldiers rescue him from the basement of the bombed-out building. Gad couldn't believe his ears when one of them called out in Yiddish: "Is there someone whose name is Gad Beck?" The information channels of the "Hechaluz" reached into the Red Army via the Red Cross. When Gad raises his hand, the soldier says: "Brieder, you're free!"
A miracle: his parents and sister, his closest friend Heinz/Zvi and a few others also survived. They all emigrate to Palestine and start a new life in Tel Aviv.
The fact that Gad did not play an important role in politics after the founding of the Israeli state disappoints many who know him. He is one of the people in the small country who had previously been politically active. But Gad agrees with David Ben-Gurion's assessment: "You don't have the elbows for that!"
He preferred to work in the social, integrative field, organising the integration of the many immigrants in the 1950s. His Israeli years, as he later recounts them, were carefree, unobtrusive, embedded.
Nevertheless, he returned to Europe in the sixties, initially as an assistant to Nathan Schwalb-Dror from "Hechaluz", who conducted reparations negotiations with West German institutions. In the seventies, Gad was instrumental in organising the youth work of the Jewish community in Vienna. In 1978, Heinz Galinski, the chairman of the Berlin Jewish community, brought him back to his native city, where he took over the management of the Jewish Adult Education Centre.
Celebrated as a hero on Christopher Street Day in New York
He has been with Julius there for years, the beautiful Julius, whom he took out of Prague behind the Iron Curtain and with whom he will share the rest of his life.
In the nineties, a lively period begins, his memoirs "And Gad went to David" are written, Gad is with Alfred Biolek, he goes on a reading tour, his book is published in the USA, Gad sits as "our great hero" on a float at Christopher Street Day in New York - "Hero yes, but a little one", he says coquettishly -, his life is documented in the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
Various producers and directors are interested in the story, Dani Levy is also interested for a while, but something always fails. "Only Steven Spielberg can make a film of my life, forgive me," says Gad dryly.
In 2006, the documentary film "The Freedom of Storytelling" was made, a portrait of the captivating storyteller, anti-Sunday speaker and artist of life Gad Beck. A producer is now tackling the feature film again.
In the last few years, peace returns, diabetes, which had been poorly treated for years, comes back with late effects, Gad's sister dies in Israel, and finally Gad goes into a home, tirelessly cared for and accompanied by Julius. His vitality slowly fades, the flirtatious jokes become rarer. Last weekend, shortly before his 89th birthday, he let go of life.
Frank Heibert is a literary translator and editor of Gad Beck's memoirs "Und Gad ging zu David", Edition diá 1995. The German edition of the book is only available in antiquarian bookshops, the English translation is still available.
Further links:
Trailer of the documentary film "The freedom of storytelling" with Gad Beck
Youtube channel Yadvashemgerman with a multi-part Gad Beck interview
In the Holocoust Museum in Washington D.C. is a short diary by Manfred Lewin about his life as a gay man in Berlin in the 1940s, which he gave to his friend Gad Beck.
