Gay and Jewish and a Hero

Gad Beck was born in Berlin in 1923 into a Christian/Jewish family. As the Nazis took power in Germany and the lives of the Jews became increasingly difficult his status as a mischling (having a Christian parent along with a Jewish parent) saved him from deportation and incarceration. Although suffering under the insults and humiliation of the Nazis Gad and his family, like so many Jews during this horrific time, tried to live with dignity and pride. He also chose to live openly as a Jew and reclaim his Jewish heritage while also acknowledging his homosexuality.

An Underground Life - Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin is a short autobiography jam packed with details of bourgeois life in Germany during the Nazi era as well as intimate glimpses of what it was like living as a gay man in a world where your very existence was threatened hour by hour, day by day.

Yet, as hellish and schizophrenic as life must have been for Jews and homosexuals in a Nazi Berlin, Gad's narrative is almost serene in his descriptions of daily existance.