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The Last Gay Holocaust Survivor Has Passed Away

Posted by on Jun 26, 2012 in Bad News | 3 comments

Gad Beck, left.

Bad news, y’all.

BERLIN – Gad Beck, an anti-Nazi Zionist resistance fighter and the last known gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, died on Sunday in Berlin. He passed away in a senior citizens’ home six days before his 89th birthday, which would have been on June 30.

Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-World War II German society. He was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking.

On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in New York called me a great hero. I said no… I’m really a little hero.”

Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life was the wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center to free his Jewish lover Manfred Lewin, who had declined to separate himself from his family.

The Nazis would later deport the entire Lewin family to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

Damn. It sounds like homeboy lived. That kind of puts whatever squabbles you may be going through today into perspective, doesn’t it?

Honor Mr. Beck today by reading the rest of his heartbreaking, inspiring story, and then putting some positive energy out into the world for his partner of 35 years, Julius Laufer.

(via JPost)