Men
With the Pink Triangle : The True, Life-And-Death Story of
Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps by Heinz
Heger, Kalus Muller (Introduction), David Fernback
(Translator)
It has only been since the mid-1970s that any
attention has been paid to the persecution and interment of gay
men by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Since that time, books
such as Richard Plant's The
Pink Triangle (and Martin Sherman's play Bent)
have illuminated this nearly lost history. Heinz Heger's
first-person account, The Men with the Pink Triangle, was
one of the first books on the topic and remains one of the most
important.
In 1939, Heger, a Viennese university student,
was arrested and sentenced to prison for being a
"degenerate." Within weeks he was transported to
Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany, and forced to
wear a pink triangle to show that his crime was homosexuality. He
remained there, under horrific conditions, until the end of the
war in 1945. The power of The Men with the Pink Triangle
comes from Heger's sparse prose and his ability to recall--and
communicate--the smallest resonant details. The pain and squalor
of everyday camp life--the constant filth, the continuous presence
of death, and the unimaginable cruelty of those in command--are
all here. But Heger's story would be unbearable were it not for
the simple courage he and others used to survive and, having
survived, that he bore witness. This book is harrowing but
necessary reading for everyone concerned about gay history, human
rights, or social justice. --Michael Bronski
Midwest Book Review
For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people.
Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians
finally recognize that gay people, like Jews, Gypsies, and others
deemed "undesirable," suffered enormously at the hands
of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration
camps, only one ever came forward to tell his story. His true
account of those nightmarish years provides an important
introduction to a long-forgotten chapter of gay history.
An
Underground Life : Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Living
Out) by Gad Beck, Frank Heibert, Allison Brown
(Translator)
"This book makes it possible to gain a
genuine look at the daily task of survival and at Jewish life in
the just about hopeless situation at the edge of the
Holocaust."-Der Tagesspiegel
"Vividly written. . . . An excellent
antidote to the stereotyping of Germans under these
conditions."-George Mosse
That Gad Beck, a Jew in the Berlin of Nazi
Germany, lived through the Holocaust at all is surprising. The
fact that he lived through it as a homosexual Jew who spent the
entire war funneling food, money, and clothing to hidden Jews and
helping smuggle others out of the country is amazing.
It was love that gave him both the impetus and
the strength to fight. The rise of National Socialism was tearing
his family apart, destroying his school, thwarting his dream of
emigration to Israel. Then the Nazis came for Manfred Lewin,
Beck's first love, and for his family. Gad's love for Manfred gave
him the courage to don a three-sizes-too-large Hitler Youth
uniform, march into the transit camp where the Lewins were being
held, and demand-and obtain, to his astonishment-the release of
his lover. But Manfred would not leave without his family, and so
went back into the camp. The Lewins did not survive.
Coming of age as a gay man during the war and
maintaining a series of romantic relationships while carrying on
his resistance work, Beck reveals a tenacity and irrepressible
spirit that is his real legacy. His determination to keep loving,
living, and believing in every human possibility without
compromise-even in the face of the unthinkably monstrous-makes
this quite a different story of the Holocaust.
