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May. 28th, 2022 10:22 pmAfter reading A Rainbow Thread a few months ago, I found out that my library carried the memoirs of one of the featured sources, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, which I have just finished reading.
Gad Beck, the author, was a half-Jewish teenager when Hitler rose to power; although his family was extremely assimilated and he was close with his relatives on his non-Jewish mother's side, he ended up becoming deeply involved in Zionist youth organizing as one of the only available social outlets, which eventually landed him in the organizational center of a network of young Jews who managed to avoid deportation and remain in hiding in Berlin throughout the war.
The book is very anecdotal and -- though it seems weird to say about a Holocaust memoir -- chatty in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Beck is clearly an extrovert who liked and was interested in people: he wants to give a good picture of day-to-day life as it changed throughout the period, and tell any particularly interesting and daring tales of escape or adventure, of which he has many. He's also very interested in drawing a complex, affectionate and truthful picture of the Christian relatives and the ways in which they reacted to the changing situation for the Jewish branch of the family; also he is extremely happy to tell us all about his many and varied romantic and sexual relationships and encounters during this period, whether serious or fleeting, tragic or sweet or coercive or transactional. (Beck's first great love is with a young man who's deported to a camp and dies -- Beck's attempt to rescue him is the story that's told in A Rainbow Thread -- and his second is another one of the young men in his network who survives, albeit on a knife-edge, through the war.) One interesting element of the time is that he rarely if ever seems to encounter additional problems based on his sexuality. In fact, it's rather the reverse -- his family all know about it and are fine with it and are much, much more concerned with his underground activities than with whatever he and his friends might get up to in bed, and he's often able to make queer non-Jewish men sympathize with him and/or make use of their attraction to him to build his network of resources.
(As a sidenote, several of the sexualized interactions with adult men such as an uncle and a teacher that Beck writes about from his childhood are events that made me deeply uncomfortable to read about, though Beck himself seems to remember them fondly as harmless and pleasant encounters that helped him form his own sense of gay identity and I do not feel it is for me to complain about how Gad Beck contextualizes his own experiences.)
A slim and incredibly interesting and individualized little book, about a deeply interesting individual during a deeply weird and bad time.
Gad Beck, the author, was a half-Jewish teenager when Hitler rose to power; although his family was extremely assimilated and he was close with his relatives on his non-Jewish mother's side, he ended up becoming deeply involved in Zionist youth organizing as one of the only available social outlets, which eventually landed him in the organizational center of a network of young Jews who managed to avoid deportation and remain in hiding in Berlin throughout the war.
The book is very anecdotal and -- though it seems weird to say about a Holocaust memoir -- chatty in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Beck is clearly an extrovert who liked and was interested in people: he wants to give a good picture of day-to-day life as it changed throughout the period, and tell any particularly interesting and daring tales of escape or adventure, of which he has many. He's also very interested in drawing a complex, affectionate and truthful picture of the Christian relatives and the ways in which they reacted to the changing situation for the Jewish branch of the family; also he is extremely happy to tell us all about his many and varied romantic and sexual relationships and encounters during this period, whether serious or fleeting, tragic or sweet or coercive or transactional. (Beck's first great love is with a young man who's deported to a camp and dies -- Beck's attempt to rescue him is the story that's told in A Rainbow Thread -- and his second is another one of the young men in his network who survives, albeit on a knife-edge, through the war.) One interesting element of the time is that he rarely if ever seems to encounter additional problems based on his sexuality. In fact, it's rather the reverse -- his family all know about it and are fine with it and are much, much more concerned with his underground activities than with whatever he and his friends might get up to in bed, and he's often able to make queer non-Jewish men sympathize with him and/or make use of their attraction to him to build his network of resources.
(As a sidenote, several of the sexualized interactions with adult men such as an uncle and a teacher that Beck writes about from his childhood are events that made me deeply uncomfortable to read about, though Beck himself seems to remember them fondly as harmless and pleasant encounters that helped him form his own sense of gay identity and I do not feel it is for me to complain about how Gad Beck contextualizes his own experiences.)
A slim and incredibly interesting and individualized little book, about a deeply interesting individual during a deeply weird and bad time.
