Gad Beck, 88, last known gay Jewish Holocaust survivor, dies

Gad Beck, the last known gay Jewish Holocaust survivor, who fought the Nazis in a resistance unit before being imprisoned late in World War II, died at 88 in Berlin on June 24.

During the war, Beck put on a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center in an attempt to free his lover, Manfred Lewin. In his 1999 memoir, “The Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin,” Beck wrote that Lewin said to him, ”Gad, I can’t go with you. My family needs me. If I abandon them now, I could never be free.”

Beck wrote: ”No smile, no sadness. He had made his decision. We didn’t even say goodbye. He turned around and went back. Lewin and all of his family later perished in Auschwitz.”

In 1943 Beck — defined by the Nazis as a “half-breed” because he had one non-Jewish parent — was freed from the Rosenstrasse holding compound in Berlin after the non-Jewish wives of the prisoners protested. The Rosenstrasse demonstration led him to join a Zionist resistance unit, the Chug Chaluzi.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/gad-beck-88-last-known-gay-jewish-holocaust-survivor/