As I arrive on campus each morning, I often see Martin Ostwald, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Classics, walking to work from his home on Walnut Lane. Now 80, Ostwald paces purposefully to his 4-by-6 carrel on the third floor of McCabe Library, where he spends his days reading texts in Greek and writing articles and e-mail in English and German. These days, there’s a different rhythm to Ostwald’s life—but it hasn’t always been so quiet.

Ostwald is one of Swarthmore’s best-known teacher-scholars—revered by his students and widely recognized for his contributions to classical studies. If you engage him in a conversation about contemporary politics (about which he is very much up-to-date), he will soon cite a classical author who has just the right take on today’s problems. He is the model of an educated man—but he is also a man with an extraordinary history, the last of his generation to stride Swarthmore’s sidewalks.

As he helped us prepare “Émigré: The College as a Place of Refuge,” he showed us the passport he carried when he left Nazi Germany in 1939. He has kept it all these years—stamped with a prominent J for “Jew.” The photo inside is of a handsome young man, age 17, with a slightly worried look on his face. When it was taken, perhaps he knew that he would be leaving his home—and his parents—behind. He did not know what lay ahead of him.

Ostwald is the last of a magnificent generation of émigré professors who taught at Swarthmore from the 1930s until the 1980s. He rightly sees himself as a scholar and teacher who made it on his own merits after a near-tragic start. The passport is a symbol of the past; although he says he can’t forget about the past, he refuses to be defined by it or singled out because of it.

Writers of history have a way of putting people into boxes. Our article “Émigré” inevitably does this with the experiences of Ostwald, Hilde Cohn, Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach, Olga Lang, Franz Mautner, and six others whose profiles appear in our Web edition only. All came to America and to Swarthmore after living in their homelands became impossible because of religion, politics, and violence; yet each is a distinct individual with a unique story.

Swarthmore was one of many American colleges and universities that offered refuge—and distinguished careers—to intellectuals fleeing fascism and war. Yet the College should not take undue moral credit for hiring them; it merely upheld its own high standards of teaching, scholarship, intellectual freedom, and humanity. These men and women were asked to teach here because of what they could offer, not because they were victims of oppression. In the bargain, Martin Ostwald and his émigré colleagues enriched this college for more than half a century.

—Jeffrey Lott