There's been much discussion today about Gad Beck and whether he is the last living gay Holocaust survivor.
Last week, The New York Times and other news agencies reported the death of Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last surviving person sent to a Nazi concentration camp because of his homosexuality.
Specifically, Brazda was the last known "pink triangle" detainee. (The Nazis imprisoned gay men and forced them to wear pink triangles as the Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David.)
During the weekend, Alice Murray, director of the Dallas Holocaust Museum, told Dallas Voice that another gay survivor still lived: Gad Beck, who wrote an autobiography, An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, and was profiled a decade ago in a documentary about gays and the Holocaust, Paragraph 175.
Ten years ago, I interviewed Beck. He told me that the Nazis never sent him to a concentration camp because his mother wasn't Jewish. His Jewish lover, Manfred Lewin, perished in Auschwitz.
From Gerard Koskovich, curator of the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco, who wrote to me this morning:
"Gad Beck was one of the gay heroes of the Nazi era, but he was never a pink triangle internee. As his published autobiography clearly states, he was a member of the Jewish underground who survived in Berlin until near the end of the war, when he was briefly interned in a transit camp because he was Jewish. The Nazis didn’t know he was homosexual, and he was not interned for that reason.
Rudolf Brazda was the last known survivor of the 5,000 to 15,000 pink triangle internees—men who were deported to the concentration camps specifically on charges of homosexuality. We should not confuse individuals whose homosexuality was unknown to the Nazis and who were interned for other reasons with those who were specifically targeted for persecution as homosexuals. ...
Gad Beck initially escaped internment even as a Jew, although shifts in the Nazi policy and practice ultimately made him vulnerable in that regard, as well.
As for gay survivors who were interned for other reasons, in addition to Gad Beck and Jerry Rosenstein (a gay Jewish survivor who told his story in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996), I know of at least one more: a man who lives in Florida who was interned as a Jew when he was a young teen; he already knew he was gay, and he recalls being helped by a pink triangle internee who shared his bread ration.
This man contacted me several years ago when I was working with the Pink Triangle Coalition and was advising the International Organization on Migration (IOM) in its unsuccessful effort to locate any surviving pink triangle internees. He has not authorized me to give his name publicly, but you may share the details of the story, if you wish. His story suggests that there may well be other gay survivors of the Holocaust still living.
The final point worth making: Rudolf Brazda was the last known pink triangle internee, but the key word is "known." Brazda did not come forward during the time when the IOM conducted an international media and advertising campaign to locate pink triangle survivors—indeed, no previously unknown survivors declared themselves at that time.
It's unlikely—but not impossible—that there are any further pink triangle survivors, if only for generational and statistical reasons. Of the 5,000 to 15,000 men interned as homosexuals, an estimated 2,000 to 6,000 survived their time in the camps. Most if not all were at least in their 30s at the time of the Liberation, which means any survivors would now be in their mid-90s at the youngest. Given the average lifespan for men of that generation, few would likely still be alive. When we take into account the physical and psychological harm suffered by the pink triangle cohort, the likelihood that significant numbers survived into their 90s declines even more steeply.
I hope that other pink triangle survivors come forward to tell their stories, but I fear that hope is a vain one. That's why it's all the more precious that Rudolf Brazda decided at the age of 93 to recount his memories."