Gay Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany says he was never unlucky

Beck considers himself to have been a lucky man throughout the Nazi years

May 5, 2000
Web posted at: 10:28 p.m. EDT (0228 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Gad Beck could hardly have been born into more trying circumstances. He grew up in Germany as Adolf Hitler came to power. Not only was Beck Jewish, he was gay, and that made him doubly vulnerable.

But, he says, "I was never unlucky; no moment in my life. I was a lucky man."

"The unique story is that he was persecuted because he was Jewish but he was also gay," says Klaus Mueller of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Some of the network that he built in Berlin depended on gay men he knew." He relied on that network to stay alive.

Jews worldwide have been commemorating the Holocaust this week.

In Israel on Tuesday, traffic came to a standstill for two minutes in silent tribute to the 6 million holocaust victims.

In Europe, the March of the Living brought Holocaust survivors together with thousands of students from Israel, Poland and other countries as they followed a 3-kilometer (2-mile) path from Auschwitz, Poland, to the camp's gas chambers at Birkenau, where the Nazis killed more than 1 million Jews from 1940 to 1945 while occupying Poland.

Beck, the director of the Jewish Adult Education Center in Berlin, was a teen-ager when Jews were forced to wear yellow stars. He watched as Jewish businesses were closed and millions were sent to concentration camps.

He learned of the holocaust when a friend held in the Birkenau camp wrote him a letter, warning him that Jews were being killed.

One evening, while still a teen-ager, he went to visit his first boyfriend, Manfred, but he and his family were gone, taken to a holding station for transport to a death camp.

Beck as a boy

Desperate to help, Beck disguised himself as a member of the Hitler youth, went to the transport station, and made up a story that Manfred had stolen some keys.

Beck promised the Nazi guards he'd bring Manfred back, saying, "What would I need a Jew for?"

As the two left the camp, Beck told Manfred, "Now you are free."

"'No,' he said, 'I can never be free if my whole family is inside. I have to be together with them,'" Beck said.

Manfred walked back to the Nazis. Beck never saw him again.

"In this moment I decided, I will fight," he said.

Beck joined the Jewish underground, smuggling food, arranging housing and helping Jews escape from Berlin, often by bribing German officials.

There were always close calls, the constant possibility of arrest by the Nazis, and as the tide turned against the Nazis, the nightly rain of Allied bombs on Berlin.

Still in his teens, Beck organized the escape of hundreds of Jews out of Nazi Germany and led his own resistance group.

Beck says he never felt in danger for being gay. But according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 50,000 homosexuals were sent to prison; as many as 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Though the numbers are difficult to judge, as many as 9,000 homosexuals died in the camps.

Experiments, including castration, were conducted to try to cure what the Nazis saw as a sickness. "If you so-called agreed to voluntary castration, you had a chance to be exempted to be deported to concentration camp," Mueller said.

In 1995 Beck wrote his autobiography, titled "An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin."

Now in his late 70s, Beck says it's his duty to speak publicly not only about what happened under the reign of Hitler, but to fight for homosexual equality today.

"Gay men and lesbian woman have to fight for our rights," he says. And he hopes it's never too late to learn from the past and fight for the future.

Correspondent Wolf Blitzer contributed to this report.

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