ESSAY Beck’s List

ANDREW LEAR

NY DEFINITION of a “hero” has to be ex - Beck was not interested in hiding his sexuality either, pansive enough to accommodate everyone though he may not have had much choice. He seems to have from Achilles to Harriet Tubman, among been one of those gay guys with a feminine side that they can’t many other well-known examples both fic - easily conceal. As a child, he didn’t like to roughhouse but did tional and historical. One person in history like to play with dolls. As an adult, he was what we might call who isn’t well known, but who certainly fits a “swish”; sexually, he was a “bottom,” and a rather promis - almost any definition of a hero, is Gad Beck, who resisted the cuous one at that (but, like many people, he preferred cuddling Nazis inside during World War II and saved several above all else). What’s more, he was remarkably open about dozen lives. all this, starting with his first experience at age eleven, with a Beck started life as a gay Jewish boy (also short, slight, and gym teacher, after which he didn’t hesitate to tell his mother nonviolent) and ended up leading the most successful resist - about the encounter. Aance cell in Nazi —and he even survived the war. In fact, Over time, Beck would develop a set of attitudes that make he lived until 2012, which means that if I had started my re - him look remarkably modern—in fact, quite admirable even search on him just a few years before I did, I might have been by today’s standards. While he could not have known today’s able to meet him in person. During World War II, he won many word “intersectionality,” he was a proud exemplar of it as one small victories against the Nazis in the best of all possible who belonged simultaneously to several disempowered groups. ways—through bravery, a capacity to make (and defend) He had one Jewish parent and was the product of a mixed mar - friends, and wit. In many ways, he was reminiscent of the riage; he was an effeminate homosexual; and he associated mythical archetype of the trickster, which could embrace every - with the most marginalized elements of society. His friends in - one from Homer’s Odysseus to the Norse god Loki. cluded gypsies, prostitutes, the disabled—a panoply of victims He was born as Gerhard Beck in Berlin in 1923. (Gad is a of discrimination and bigotry. As a half-Jew from a bourgeois Hebrew name that he chose for himself later family, he did have a kind of privilege, but on.) This was well before the rise of the Gad Beck started out as a he didn’t want to take advantage of it; he al - Nazis, at a time when Berlin was quite pro - gay Jewish boy and ended ways identified with the poor of the gressive even by today’s standards. There up leading the most ghetto. was an atmosphere of religious tolerance This commitment is what came to the such that a “mixed marriage” like that of successful resistance cell fore during the Nazi period. The Becks Beck’s parents was neither uncommon nor in Nazi Berlin—and he were in somewhat protected categories— frowned upon. His mother was a working- survived the War. Heinrich (Gerhard and Margot’s father) be - class Christian young woman who married cause he was married to an “Aryan,” and her glamorous, Viennese Jewish boss. Both Beck and his sister because they were of their families were against the marriage, but they mostly got “Mischlinge ” (half-breeds). They were all arrested in the Fab - over it. Indeed, during the Nazi period, his mother’s family did rikaktion of 1943, when Eichmann attempted to deport every everything they could to protect their sister and brother-in- last Jew or partial Jew from Germany, but along with many law—and especially their nephew and niece, namely Beck and others they were released after dramatic protests by the his twin sister Margot (later Miriam). “Aryan” wives and mothers (including Beck’s mother and As children, Gerhard and Margot also went to regular state aunts). In the end, only Beck himself was not released, and for schools. Even after the Nazis took control, Beck’s parents, his activities as a resistance leader rather than simply for being like most middle-class German Jews, hoped the anti-Semitic Jewish. wave would just pass by. They instructed their son to keep his While his parents tried (broadly speaking) to lie low and just head down, ignore the bullying, and stay in his high school survive, Beck became ever more involved in his Zionist youth preparing for university. But this is where Beck’s character group, the Hechalutz, as it morphed into a resistance cell, pro - started to show: he didn’t want to conceal his identity. As soon tecting Jews who had gone underground to avoid deportation. as he heard there was a Jewish high school in the Scheunen - Eventually, when the founder of the cell fled to , viertel—the old Jewish neighborhood, later the Nazis’ Beck ended up running the group. By the end of the war, he was ghetto—he wanted to attend, and he was much happier once organizing support for 36 “illegal” Jews in hiding in Berlin, ar - he was there. ranging new hiding places (when old ones fell through), secur - ing ration cards or buying food for them on the black market, Andrew Lear is a gay history scholar and president of Oscar Wilde and so on. Tours. He is developing a biopic about Gad Beck. Some of his exploits in this period were astonishing. Two

May –June 2020 15 in particular stand out for me, though so Beck and his sister could hide there, there were quite a few others. and he told Lewin to go there and wait for him. But this is where the roller - IN THE EARLY 1940s, Beck fell in love coaster goes back down. It was only with a boy called Manfred Lewin, 1942. Most people didn’t know about whom he met in the Hechalutz. In fact, death camps, and Lewin didn’t think he the story of how they fell in love is one could abandon his family to face depor - worth telling. Those who know the tation to a work camp in Poland with - Verdi opera Don Carlo will under - out their strong, young son. So he stand. They were chosen to read the insisted on going back—to his death, as roles of Don Carlo and the Marquis it turned out. His whole family was Posa in a staged reading of Schiller’s murdered at Auschwitz. play (on which the opera is based)—a classic pair of “buddies” who could THE OTHER OF BECK ’S AMAZING FEATS easily be boyfriends. So one thing led took place in 1945, after the to another. finally caught up with him. They found But in 1942, Lewin, who was Jew - the apartment where he was staying ish on both sides, was taken for de - with a later boyfriend and collaborator, portation along with his family. Zwi Aviram, and arrested them in the Beck’s response was not what you middle of the night. Stupidly, Beck had would expect. He raced to the paint kept extensive records of the money business where Lewin had been doing that they had used to support their “il - forced labor and talked to the boss. It legals”—money collected by Jewish was a risky move, but Lewin had told Gad Beck as a young man. organizations and transmitted to them him that the boss was just a regular German businessman, not via Switzerland. So the Gestapo had a ton of information to a committed Nazi. He told the boss what had happened, and question them about. Yet Beck managed to deceive them again. when he was sure that the boss was on his side, he told him They made him write a confession, and he went all the way, that he wanted to rescue Lewin. And the boss did in fact offer writing thirty pages about all the diplomats and Jewish organi - help: he said that his son was out and that Beck could borrow zations that had helped him—but he carefully avoided men - his Hitlerjugend uniform to gain entry into the holding camp. tioning anyone who was still in Germany. So Beck put on the uniform—several sizes too big—and went The Gestapo tried everything to get more complete infor - down to the Scheunenviertel. He made a few “Heil Hitlers” mation—including the trick Baron Scarpia uses in Tosca , that of and asked to speak to the commandant, whom he proceeded, having Aviram beaten in a nearby room while questioning Beck. as was his style, to bullshit. He told him that Lewin worked But they couldn’t break either of them. Beck even managed to with him renovating apartments and had failed to turn in keys throw them off by using his social skills. By an extraordinary that his company needed. He had to take Lewin back to have coincidence, the torturer who was questioning him—with brass him show them which key was for which apartment. He would knuckles on the table between them—whose name was Erich bring him back soon: “What would I want with a Jew?” he Möller, was an old family connection. Before the war, Möller asked. and his wife had run a newspaper stand that Beck’s father sup - Amazingly enough, it worked. The commandant let him walk plied with cigarettes, and they were particularly kind to Beck out of there with Lewin. It didn’t matter much to him, and Beck and his sister. Beck managed to find a moment in the interro - was careful not to seem too excited. Truly a triumph worthy of gation to remind Möller of their acquaintance. Odysseus! True to form, Beck had it all planned out. One of his Is that what saved them? No one knows. They may just Christian uncles had built an air-raid shelter at his country house, have been left alive because the Allies were closing in on Berlin, and Beck was well known in resistance circles, so the Gestapo men were afraid to kill him. In any case, somehow they survived until the Red Army arrived and liberated them. Indeed, Beck lived to a ripe old age, and Aviram is still alive and living in Israel. The heroism of Gad Beck deserves to be remembered and celebrated. He was an underdog in almost every way. Small and slight, he was a member of two minorities that were des - tined for extermination under the Nazis. But instead of trying to hide his identities, he stood up for himself and for his peo - ple. His only weapons were quick thinking, a knack for story - telling, and excellent social skills, which he brought to bear against the Nazi extermination machine, saving himself and two boyfriends (though one of them not for long), and 36 other German Jews.

16 The G &LR