Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator. His father was and Austrian Jew his mother converted. Under Nazi law he was consider (half-breed) he and his father were not deported and remained in Berlin. Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life, was his attempt to rescue his boyfriend Manfred Lewin, he enters a Nazi pre deportation camp in a borrow Nazi youth uniformed, where Manfred had been arrested and detain and ask for his release, and it was granted. Outside the building Manfred declined to go with him, not wanting to abandon his family. The two parted ways without saying goodbye. Beck “in those seconds watching him go I grew up” Manfred and his entire family were murdered in Auschwitz. Beck join Chug Chaluzi, an underground Zionist resistance youth group and play a key role in securing the survival of Jews in Berlin, he was able to turn to his non-Jewish homosexual acquaintances to help supply food and hiding places. After the war Beck helped organize efforts to immigrate Jewish survivors to Palestine emigrating himself in 1947. Beck returned to Berlin in 1979 where he became the director of the Jewish adult education center.