Fred Manasse was born in July 1935 in Frankfurt, Germany, one of two sons of practicing Orthodox Jewish parents. His father owned a ladies' shoe factory, which was confiscated during the war but returned to the family after the war's end. The heirs rebuilt and modernized the business, and sold it to the foreman who ran it throughout the war making military footwear. Manasse admits that he has few memories of his early life in Germany because he was very young and very protected during that period. He went back to Baden Baden, Germany as an adult to visit the memorial for the Holocaust. During that trip he went to the hotel his maternal grandparents had owned, and there a number of memories came back.

After the Nuremburg edicts [Annotator's Note: the Nuremburg Laws] and Krystalnacht [Annotator's Note: the occasion of concerted violence by Nazis against Jewish people and their property throughout Germany and Austria on 9 November 1938], most of Fred Manasse's father's family wanted to leave Germany. His mother's family stayed and they survived. His father attempted to get a visa for the United States, but was unsuccessful. Instead, he bought a visa for Cuba with the intention of emigrating there, setting up a home, and transporting his family when he was settled. Because his paternal grandmother refused to leave Germany, and Manasse's mother was her caretaker, she did not accompany her husband, and kept her toddler daughter with her. Manasse and his older brother went to an orphanage in Belgium, a neutral country, as part of the Kindertransport program [Annotator's Note: an organized rescue effort to place endangered children in foster homes in England] for safekeeping until his father could "ransom" them. Manasse does not remember anything about living in the orphanage. The boat the elder Manasse took to Cuba [Annotator's Note: the MS St. Louis] was denied entry when it reached port, so it sailed on to the Miami, Florida, where it was once again refused. Manasse said neither the United States Congress nor the president intervened, so the captain headed back to Hamburg. He noted that most of the people who returned to Germany, including Manasse's father, died in the German concentration and extermination camps. The elder Manasse traveled to Belgium, which had not yet been invaded by the Germans, to be near his sons' orphanage. Manasse has photographs of the three of them celebrating his birthday in Brussels.

His father continued his attempts to get his family out of Europe, according to Fred Manasse, and when Belgium was invaded on 10 May 1940 the Jewish community of Brussels arranged for two cattle cars to be added to a passenger train headed for southern France. Manasse, then almost five years old, was the smallest and youngest child among the passengers, and remembers the train car having one little window through which he saw the flashes and heard the noises of the bombs blowing up the train yard they had just left. He also remembers they had no food for three days, but one of the older boys performed magic tricks and kept them entertained. When they arrived in southern France, the Jewish community had arranged for them to be housed in an old chateau, but the man who was to administer the project disappeared and Manasse and the other children lived in a barn in the town of Seyre for a little over a year. Manasse said living conditions were "horrible." The Swiss Red Cross came to their rescue by adding them to the ranks of French orphans in the area of Toulouse. Manasse had learned to speak French in Belgium, so he was comfortable with the language and could attend school. Once he reached a certain age, his brother was apprenticed at a bakery and occasionally brought Manasse warm bread. He said they "managed to survive" there until early 1944.

In 1943, Fred Manasse saw some of the older Jewish children gathered up by the French for transport to a detention camp with a final destination of Germany. The orphanage director's wife demanded their release, and many of them found escape routes out of the country. It became important for Manasse and his brother, who was 12 years old at the time, to leave the orphanage so they were placed in a Catholic convent, where they were examined for pests. In embarrassment, his brother and a friend ran away to Toulouse, promising to come back for Manasse. True to their word, they eventually got Manasse out, and either the French Underground or the Joint Distribution Committee [Annotator’s Note: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is a humanitarian assistance organization based in New York, New York], Manasse doesn't know which, helped them to escape over the Pyrenees Mountains. He was eight years old and remembered it was cold and they carried no food. The boys were in rags and they had to bury themselves in the snow during the day and travel at night. During the three miserable days of the journey, Manasse recalled "crying a lot." On the third day they arrived at a safe farmhouse somewhere in Spain. He vividly remembers the meal: a fat frittata, good peasant bread and butter, and white wine. Manasse said he got "roaring drunk," but he was "happy in that house."

The day after they arrived in Spain, Fred Manasse and his brother caught a train to Barcelona, Spain where they stayed in a safe house for two months with about a dozen other children who were in the same circumstances. When their passports were in order and it was safe to move the children to Portugal, Manasse was taken to Lisbon. He was placed in another orphanage for about six months, and Manasse's most vivid memory of Lisbon involved riding the Eifel elevator at the train station. He returned there as an adult, and was reminded, by a woman who was there at the time, of his bad behavior when he left on the boat for America. The Atlantic crossing through German submarine infested waters took two weeks and Manasse remembers being seasick the entire time. The ship landed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where his cousin, an American soldier, met him and his brother. Together they traveled to New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York], and walked to Times Square. Manasse could not speak English, so could not read any of the many signs that lined the streets he walked along. His cousin bought him his first American hot dog then took him on a subway to reach his uncle's home in Manhattan. The family had gathered there and treated the immigrants to a wonderful kosher meal.

There wasn't enough room in any of the family's homes for Fred Manasse and his brother, so it fell to the JCCA [Annotator's Note: Jewish Child Care Association] to find them a foster home. A social worker took them to a temporary home in the Bronx where Manasse stayed for a couple of months and learned some English. He was almost ten years old, known to be behaviorally difficult, and a permanent situation for him was not easily found. He was moved to an orphanage in Pleasantville, New York that was also a reformatory. After a few weeks there, he was sent to a farm in Kingston, New York to work cleaning chicken coops. At the end of that summer, Manasse was placed with a couple in the Bronx, in a household that Manasse said was "female dominated." Because of his language deficiency, he was put in a lower grade at school than his age dictated, and was teased a lot. Manasse said he responded with his fists. At home, his foster mother helped him with his English, but she also trained him to do all manner of household chores, then considered women's work, during the three to four years he spent there. It so happened that he was assigned a male social worker who took a different view of the boy's developmental needs and instigated a psychological evaluation. As a result, he was removed from the couple's care. His grades improved and he was promoted through several grades. When he was in junior high he was able to meet his brother when they were both on their way to school in Brooklyn. He continued to excel academically and within seven years of arriving in the United States, Manasse was a high school graduate. By taking classes during the summers, he graduated college at the age of 20.

Coming up in America, Fred Manesse said he didn't know much about the Holocaust, or that he was a victim of the war. Both he and his brother, through the social agencies, tried to find out what happened to his parents, but could not get answers. Manasse admits that he wasn't that interested; he wanted to be an American, "so who gave a damn what the hell happened in Europe." He had his brother and his uncle, and became acquainted with some cousins, who were all busy finding their way. Manasse said his family members were always able to make money, so they created wealth within the family through business, rather than the professions. Had he remained in Germany, Manasse would have been destined for a religious profession, but as it happened, he was not interested in furthering Judaism. He feels that all religions limit progress. Manasse wanted to become a scientist, to change and improve things. He studied relativity in the footsteps of his role model, Einstein [Annotator's Note: Albert Einstein], and earned a PhD from Princeton.

The older victims of the Holocaust had always viewed the displaced children as "refugees," according to Fred Manasse, because they didn't "survive" deprivation or the camps. They didn't consider someone who lost his parents, home, education, and so much else as anyone more than a displaced person with "bad memories." Until then, Manasse didn't even consider himself a "survivor," but recognized he had an obligation to get involved, to help and support the movement. He began to tell his story and feels it important to educate future generations in order to prevent history repeating itself. He said such persecutions have happened many times; it's just that the Second World War's Holocaust "happened to us, to white people, educated people, caring people, charitable people, good people" and there is "a fight to be had." Manasse wanted to teach young people how to react politically if the "wrong guy" gets into office. He saw an opportunity and felt he had a mission.

As a sculptor, Fred Manasse worked on a piece of art for his sister, through which he meant to express the "horror of the past," and was encouraged by a critic who saw potential in his subject. But part way through, the project collapsed at the point when he was trying to create an upside down family tree. He used his engineering skills and a great deal of time and money to complete the piece in bronze. When he entered it into a competition, it won awards, and Manasse decided it would be his new "métier" to make art that was relative to his heritage. In concluding his interview, Manasse wanted to point out something he learned that contributed to the man he has become: requests made in the name of a cause get attention because the aim is noble. In an effort to get support to care for his own disabled child at home, he helped get legislation passed that provided public aid and education for special needs children throughout his state.