Love inspired him to work in the resistance
When the love of his life is deported, Gad Beck joins the resistance against the Nazis – supported by his homosexual friends.
Gerhard Beck – who later adopted the name Gad – grew up in a Jewish-Christian family in Berlin during the 1920s and 30s. This was an exciting time for him as he explored his own identity, religious convictions, and sexuality, seeking adventure with little fear of repression by the Nazis – initially at least. Especially as he was making plans to leave Germany for Palestine in the near future. But then he fell ill and met the love of his life in a Jewish youth group: Manfred Lewin, 20 years old, an aesthete and a poet. The two developed a deep bond – and a strong desire to oppose the system.
“Our love was so strong, the nights belonged to us,” Gad Beck would later recall in interviews. In 1941, Gad had just turned 18 and was living in Berlin, the epicenter of Nazi terror. The city was caught between euphoric enthusiasm for the war and the early stages of the systematic murder of European Jews. His family had been “stateless” since 1938. Gad’s Jewish father, his mother – a convert from Protestantism to Judaism – and his sister had been forced to live in the cramped conditions of a “Jewish house” in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district ever since. Before that, they had lived in chic Weißensee.
For Gad, though, this terrible time was the most important period in his life, as he later went on to write in his autobiographical novel “An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin” (originally published in German in the 1990s under the title “Und Gad ging zu David”). Aware of his homosexuality for some time, he had already had several affairs by this time – with teachers, with classmates, and with other boys in the Hachshara camp in Königs Wusterhausen who were preparing to emigrate to Palestine. These relationships were thrilling, experimental adventures that were more about physicality than true love. But with Manfred Lewin, things were different.
Manfred Lewin came from a Jewish family. He was artistically inclined, a young man who enjoyed painting and writing poetry. Gad met him during theater rehearsals in a Jewish youth group. “It was boundless love. I took him to see my mother’s side of the family and they promised that we could always come to them if we were ever in trouble.” And trouble was exactly what lay ahead.
The couple was in danger on two fronts. The Nazis were subjecting homosexual men to systematic persecution and in October 1941 they began to organize mass deportations of Jews from the German Reich. Some of Gad and Manfred’s Jewish friends were deported. Initially, Gad and his sister were spared deportation because their mother had been born a Protestant. Gad – and Manfred – had to perform forced labor instead.
“And our bond grew even stronger,” Manfred wrote in a small 17-page booklet in the early summer of 1942. He gave it to his lover Gad. A parting gift, as it would soon turn out. Gestapo officers knocked on Manfred’s door in November 1942 and instructed him and his family to report to an assembly point. Gad heard the news that evening. “It’s a night I will never forget. I don’t know, I kept thinking, don’t go crazy, you have to think now, you have to do something. You have to do something,” as he later recalled in an interview he gave as a contemporary witness.
And his words were not empty promises. He borrowed a Hitler Youth uniform, proceeded to the assembly camp, and claimed that Manfred had stolen the keys to various apartments from his place of work and that he needed to take him there straight away to clarify the matter. The Gestapo officers fell for the ruse and released Manfred into Gad’s custody. But it was only a brief moment of freedom. He turned back after a few steps. “I will never feel free if I run away from my family now,” he explained to Gad and disappeared – forever. The Lewin family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on November 29, 1942, where their trail goes cold.
After Manfred’s deportation
Gad’s world fell apart – and he made a decision. Nothing like this should ever happen again. “I had to get people out through the underground before they were taken away,” is what went through his mind at this turning point in his life. He joined the religious Zionist resistance group Chug Chaluzi and used his chutzpah, his ingenuity, and his good contacts in the homosexual scene to find escape routes and hiding places for other Jews.
In 1943, Gad Beck and other members of his family were interned in the Rosenstraße assembly camp in Berlin, but he and other detainees were released after two and a half weeks following protests by non-Jewish relatives. He became head of Chug Chaluzi in the last two years of the war, but was betrayed and imprisoned in 1945. Documents kept in the Arolsen Archives indicate that he was soon to be deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Ironically, it was a bomb that saved him from deportation. He was injured and taken to hospital, where he was liberated by the Red Army on April 24, 1945.
After the war, Gad went to Munich with his parents and sister and stayed in a displaced persons camp while waiting to emigrate to Palestine. He left Germany in 1947 and spent many years in Israel, where he started to study psychology. However, he maintained close ties to Vienna, where he met his life partner. He finally returned to Berlin in 1979. He became director of the Jewish adult education center, published the novel inspired by his memories, and was one of the first survivors of the Shoah to speak openly about his homosexuality.
He passed away on June 24, 2012, just six days before his 89th birthday. A Stolperstein (stumbling block) memorial stone – laid in the Scheunenviertel district – commemorates Manfred Lewin, his first great love. Anyone who sees the stone is reminded not only of his murder – but also of a profoundly moving story.
The documents on Margot (Miriam) and Gad Beck
The stories of Gad and Margot (later Miriam) Beck reveal the complexity of historical documents. The information about both of them varies depending on the source: The “Gad Beck Papers” and an oral history interview with Gad Beck, both of which are available online through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), present a consistent account of events. Berlin is mentioned as the birthplace of both siblings, and Gad Beck refers to Miriam (Margot) Beck as his twin sister.
However, the documents held by the Arolsen Archives contain inconsistencies – both in comparison to the USHMM sources and within the documents themselves. These inconsistences include different places of birth, years of birth, and nationalities recorded for Gad Beck. The documents always list Vienna instead of Berlin as the place of birth of both Miriam and Gad. And her nationality is listed as “English” in these records, as it is in one of Gad’s documents too.
The reasons for such discrepancies cannot always be determined with any certainty. Possible explanations include changes made deliberately in difficult situations, lapses of memory, or simple spelling mistakes or errors made during translation or transcription.
Examples
