Clayton Kratz

Clayton Kratz entered the history of Mennonite Central Committee at its beginning. Hunger and devastation among Mennonite settlements in southern Russia had brought appeals to North American congregations. Committees gathered food and other assistance, and in 1920 they coordinated their response through the newly formed MCC. Kratz was one of the young men who went to help make that response possible.

The photographed timeline remembers three workers accompanying a shipment of food. MCC’s own historical account names those first workers as Orie Miller, Clayton Kratz, and Arthur Slagel. Their task was to help arrange the distribution of relief in a region where armies were still fighting and control of towns and settlements could change rapidly.

Kratz disappeared during this work. The panel says that he was presumably captured by the Red Army and was not heard from again; a later MCC account describes his arrest and presumed death. Neither supplies a confirmed death date in the material used here. His place in this history is therefore the documented work of relief and the loss that followed it, with the uncertainty about his final fate kept visible.