One of the many tales of bravery taking place during World War II is the story of Gad Beck. He was gay. He was Jewish. And he was a resistance fighter in Nazi Berlin who risked his own life to free his boyfriend.
When he was 19 he borrowed a neighbour’s Hitler Youth uniform and marched into the pre-deportation camp where his lover, Manfred Lewin, had been arrested and detained. He asked the commanding officer for the young man’s release for use in a construction project.
When outside the building, however, Lewin told Beck that he can’t leave with him, saying, “Gad, I can’t go with you. My family needs me. If I abandon them now, I could never be free.” With that, the two parted without saying goodbye. “In those seconds, watching him go,” Gad recalls, “I grew up.” Lewin and his entire family were murdered at Auschwitz.
Gad joined an underground effort to supply food and hiding places to Jews escaping to neutral Switzerland. In early 1945, a Jewish spy for the Gestapo betrayed him and some of his underground friends. He was subsequently interrogated and interned in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin.
After the war, Beck helped organise efforts to enable Jewish survivors to emigrate to Israel, emigrating himself in 1947. In the late 1970s, Beck met Julius Laufer. Eventually Laufer joined him in Israel. The two were together for 35 years.
via Wikipedia
Check out his autobiography An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin and this sweet little comic about his life.