Fred Katz was a child when he escaped Nazi Germany. Eventually he made his way to America and Guilford College.
Guilford became a sanctuary for Fred Katz, launching a journey from loss to learning, and lasting purpose.
“They saw something in me. Quakers talk about a Light we all have within ourselves. I like to think maybe Guilford saw my Light.”
Even now, all these years later, Fred Katz ’52 can summon the scene as if it were this morning: the long bus ride from his family’s farmhouse to the crowded train station in Frankfurt… his mother pulling him close on the platform, kissing his cheek. All around them, other mothers clutching other children.
It was 1939. Germany had just invaded Poland. War was beginning. From the rail car, he watched her wave through a window filmed with soot. Watched her become smaller as the train gathered speed. Smaller still, until she was only a dark speck, and then nothing at all.
Fred was 11, one of thousands boarding the Kindertransport, the Quaker-organized rescue that ferried mostly Jewish children to England and beyond. He never saw his family again. Years later, he would learn they were killed at Sobibor.
Even now, he says, the memory is sharp. “I had a sense of what was going on and who I was leaving,” he says. “But I also had a sense of what I was getting — a chance to survive.”
From Survival to Scholarship
Fred survived. More than that, he built a life. That train ride began a path from farmhand and factory worker to Ph.D. student, sociology professor, author of several books. At the center of it all was a Guilford College degree. And yet it isn’t the diploma he remembers most.
Even at 98, he thinks of Guilford as more than a college. It was a sanctuary, “a safe nest,” he calls it, lined by professors, administrators, classmates.
Those years, he says, saved him. “Maybe not at the time, but years later I understood what Guilford was to me,” he says. “It was a godsend.”
There are many words Fred uses to describe Guilford. Safe, nurturing and home, sure. But enjoyable is not one. “You’re talking to a refugee who lost his parents and his family,” he says. “Being able to enjoy life is not part of my vocabulary. That was destroyed for me in childhood by Germany.”
But the College was patient. Religious Studies professor Fred Crownfield knew his story. Classmates welcomed him. He arrived as a 22-year-old freshman, urged by a Quaker colleague in New York. No high school diploma. No money.
he admissions director didn’t flinch. “We can help with that too,” the director told him.
“No papers, no credentials, no high school diploma, and no money — but none of that mattered at Guilford,” Fred says. “They saw something in me. Quakers talk about a Light we all have within ourselves. I like to think maybe Guilford saw my Light.”
Class by class, conversation by conversation, the College gave him something few others could: hope. “I had friends who tried to give me a sense of belonging,” he says. “But it was
Guilford that gave me a sense that my life could have purpose — that I could do meaningful, creative work. It opened up a new life for me.”
Facing the Past
Every Holocaust story is a dormant volcano. Disturb it and the past erupts. For years, Fred kept his past contained. Survivors’ guilt, he says, is “guilt without perceived wrongdoing.” “It’s not because we did something wrong,” he says. “It’s because we lived and loved ones didn’t.”
After Guilford came a master’s and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and teaching posts at Texas Tech, the University of Missouri, SUNY Buffalo, and Tel Aviv University. At first he avoided the Holocaust entirely. “I told colleagues it wasn’t interesting,” he says. “But I was in denial. Of course it was. Eventually, I woke up.”
When he did, he wanted to understand how ordinary people commit the unthinkable. He wrote Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil and Confronting Evil: Two Journeys, exploring how average, “decent” people can be drawn into atrocity.
One chapter examines Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant who had once been expected to become a priest — a man initially shaken by what he saw, yet who came to oversee a death factory. A New Lens: Social Space Fred’s latest book, We Live in Social Space: A Window to a New Science, takes a wider view.
He defines social space as the invisible rules, expectations, and power currents that shape behavior. Not a physical place, but a mental and relational environment that steers how people act, often without realizing it.
“In this space,” he says, “people aren’t acting freely. Culture, institutions, language — they all guide us. We don’t even see it.”
But once understood, he argues, it can be challenged. Maybe even changed.
Even a small liberal arts college, he says, is its own kind of social space. “For four wonderful years, I was part of one at Guilford,” Fred says. “It shaped me for the better.”