In An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Germany, Gad Beck narrates his whimsically naive, guttingly tragic, and simultaneously relatable yet unrecognizable life experiences. His experiences are all too relevant today, not only for the historically curious but for those living through dangerous times brought on by the modern resurgence of fascism in Europe and the United States.
Belying the title, the events of Gads life often seem so common and unexceptional, yet he existed in a time so horrendous it has become modern shorthand for the unimaginable. He plainly tells of family struggles, grapples with being a sibling, the meshing of religious communities, coming of age, sexual discovery, systematic shunning and extermination, living, earning, hiding, surviving, and comprehending one’s own life.
“La guerre? Ce n’est pas si terrible! La mort d’un homme est, en effet, chose épouvantable; mais cent mille morts, c’est une statistique.”
~Le Comic-Finance, March 1924
“War? It’s not that terrible! The death of one man is, indeed, a terrible thing, but one hundred thousand deaths is a statistic.”
Echoes of Exclusion
Too often, when learning about and even studying war and the struggles of human civilizations, we utterly fail to understand the humanity of our history. This could be for a number of reasons. Maybe we should focus on military strategy. Maybe we care only for the thoughts, fears, and actions of a few leaders. Perhaps we limit our view to the heroic actions of a singular person, relegating those around them to mere plot fodder. Gad’s memoir breaks this mold. Interwar politics, religious revival, military maneuvering, and the horrors of the holocaust are all present but as a backdrop for his life.
An early example of the detestable effects that the world had when Gad joined a youth group. This seems like an unassailable pursuit. Camaraderie, education, experiences, discipline, what ill effect could there be? Gad recounts, “It happened like this. In 1932 we joined a German-Jewish youth group. It’s important to emphasize what kind of group it was since at the time there were a number of different youth groups, ranging from the nationalist Free Youth Movement to Zionist groups. All of them resembled the Boy or Girl Scouts to some extent, lots of sports and field trips and so on. Our first group was a real example of German-Jewish assimilation. There were the first groups to be put under pressure, as the mixing of “Aryan” and Jewish was a particular thorn in the side of the Nazis.”
Even rereading it now, I am saddened and sickened that anyone could have gone through this. But it takes willful ignorance not see the parallels with the discrimination going on surrounding the BSA. Even our Federal government is now bandwagoning anti-woke culture wars and looking to cut ties with the BSA because, what? Girly cooties?
The feeling of inevitability as the Nazi regime tightens the noose around Gad’s community is a constant mental scapegoat to avoid laying blame with the perpetrators. “’Signs telling people to “Boycott Jews!’ appeared everywhere; the most sheltered of children could not miss them. My father started feeling the effects in his business, but he never spoke to us about it. By then, however, my own experiences sufficed.”
Shouldn’t it be easy to listen to this, recognize it is wrong, and identify responsibility? But, does it lie with those who boycotted the Jewish stores? Or those who put up the signs? Maybe those who pushed to mainstream the idea? Can all the blame really be left with the masterminds behind the policy? Or maybe just the party leader? The truth is far less comforting than “it’s Hitler’s fault.” Sure, he preyed on and fomented resentment, but the blame cannot rest solely on him. Each person, the hero in their own story, making their own choices, could have recognized the folly on which they embarked.
Don’t Look Behind the Veil
“Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”
Homer Simpson, Citizen Kang
While a funny quip, Homer is not in fact absolved for all actions merely because of one. The same is true for us. When we hear baseless fearmongering aimed at our fellow human beings, we must be cognizant and responsive. While there is antisemitic rhetoric thrown around even in the halls of State, the ‘acceptable’ scapegoats of choice today are immigrants, people who identify with or support the LGBTQ+ community.
Perpetrators of division do not always come out and proudly admit that their beliefs are racist, xenophobic, and hateful. Although sometimes the veil slips. Gad observed the same malevolence being smuggled under a more palatable patriotic shell. In school, “The Nazi flag was raised and saluted every day, and every day I experienced that old friends no longer wanted to talk to me or play with me, and all because they were ‘Aryan,’ something that no one had wasted a thought on before.” What should be a welcoming, community-building exercise becomes a wedge event that separates the us and them.
The movement does not advertise itself initially as exterminators of humans; it works overtime to convince others that it is acceptable. Gad wrote, “All my cousins,” those on the Christian side of his family, “became staunch Nazi women. They experienced Nazi Germany as something new, developing, something they could help build, and they wanted to be part of it.”
A campaign to make xenophobia seem harmonious with patriotism is a live and well in the United States today. Preger U, the fake university, churns out videos that seem harmless in isolation but chip away at empathy. Once a large enough population was convinced that they were benign or even a good source of guidance, they pulled the levers of governance to cement their ideals in future generations of Americans by being used in schools.
To jump on the exciting bandwagon, Turning Point USA has become a leviathan of right-wing excitement. Building from a humble meme machine to a viral video generator to a mainstream MAGA recruiting machine in the form of the unholy offspring of the WWE and a Jim Crow tent revival.
Something Terrible
We know how this progresses, or at least we should. We live our lives. “We were sitting together at dinner, my parents, Margot, and me [Gad]. All of a sudden there was a soft knock on the door, and Erich Nehlhans came in. Usually so elegant, he looked ragged and dirty, and he was more thoughtful and quiet than normally. ‘The Nazis have done something terrible,’ he said. ‘They came into the temple and wreaked havoc.” This is how Gad experienced the Reichskristallnacht. Gad was not the direct victim of Nazi violence, and Hitler was not the direct executor of the Nazi violence either. Instead, it was a flashpoint of years of grievance peddling, scapegoating, and just asking questions about the Juden living in Germany.
It would be naive to think an American genocide would telegraph its arrival here. No, there will be signs just as there were in Germany, the conflating of Nationalism and Patriotism, the blaming of minorities for systemic problems, and the slow acceptance of the ‘inevitable’ and ‘just’ violence against those same people.
And like Gad, we live our lives. He worked, ate, slept, and loved. He also hid, absconded, secreted information, and engaged in petty sabotage of Nazi systems. Gad acknowledges that, “When told all at once like this, living illegally sounds, on one hand, like a chain of anecdotes and, on the other hand, like an inestimable mass of activities and jobs to be done at once.”
This was what I took away from Gad’s story, his young life. That is to live, even in times of horror. The making of history is complex, unimaginably so. What impact can a single person have in the face of rising Fascism? This thought, if left to ruminate on it with nothing else, would surely be debilitating. But that may not be the right question to ponder. Instead, one must ask what they can do now. For some, that will be taking direct action against power. For others, it may be feeding those around them. If could be comforting those who need it, or seeking comfort when needed. It could be building trust with those whom the powerful call untrustworthy. Building community, even when that community is small and seemingly insignificant, can be the reason to live.
Gad survived the war. Living as an illegal throughout. His story resonates with the plight of those labeled illegal today: kids, parents, family, friends, students, laborers, skilled workers, entrepreneurs, members of our communities, people. People are trying to live. The background of his story resonates, too. Many did not survive the war. Many will not survive the violence of today aimed at those called illegals: kids, parents, family, friends, students, laborers, skilled workers, entrepreneurs, members of our communities, people.
What will I do about it?
What will you do about it? There is no one answer. There is no right answer as far as I can tell. Every action and inaction is part of the greater whole of society that we all guide, but of which none of us has control. We must choose to live and, in that choice, take actions that edify ourselves and benefit others.
An Underground Life is a book I am sure to return to again and again. I am grateful to have it as part of my 2026 reading challenge. It is a reminder of youthful hope, courage, and how to live. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about living and what it means to be a human that others call illegal.
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