Thank you for joining us here today to remember, and to say good-bye to, my father, Otto G. J. Schäler. On behalf of my mother and our family, I want to express our deep appreciation for the many cards and phone calls we received from so many of you since my father died. Your kind gestures make this difficult period of adjustment easier for all of us.

I'm going to talk about some critical events at the beginning and end of my father's life. I do this to help us understand a bit more about who he was and what his struggle as a person meant to me. I see a link between my father's relationship with his father, my relationship with my father, and my relationship with my daughter. I think it's important to understand intergenerational relationships. However, I think it's also important to give up our links with the past in some ways: For example, we may blame our parents for who we are only until we become adults. And the inverse is true too: We become adults when we stop blaming our parents for who we are--for the mistakes they made, and likely continue to make in their attempts to get us to be who they think we should be. Much of who I am has a lot to do with who my father was. The example set is the lesson learned. Parents affect their children with their thoughts and behavior. Words, that is, telling their children what they should do and be, has very little to do with who their children actually become.

Reflecting on my father's life, I'm aware of three recurring themes or leitmotifs: First, he was deeply affected by the evil that people do in the world. Many people did not know this about him. He felt frightened in the world because of his experience with the holocaust. That fear had a strong hold on him, and it influenced two other parts of him: One part was the great importance he placed on being kind and gentle in the world. This is how so many of you described him in your cards and phone calls. The other part was his stubborn adherence to personal convictions regarding individualism. Coupled with this value he placed on individualism was a great respect for human diversity.

My father defied his fear with kindness and appreciation for diversity--the very opposite characteristics his demons possessed and expressed. The one thing that made him angrier than anything else was for someone to attempt to define his identity for him. No trespassing. Concurrent to his public respect for diversity was a private respect for his own individuality. He chose to define himself as he saw fit, and while he often cared very much, perhaps too much, about what others thought of him, he couldn't care less about anyone thought of his own sense of personal identity. This too was a way of challenging authority. For there is only one political virtue, obeissance to authority. And only one political sin, autonomy. And as fearful, and kind, and committed as he was to his own sense of personal convictions, my father was an angry man too. And he had a lot to be angry about. Frankly, I wish he had expressed his anger and defiance a bit more than he did.

I remember one time in 1963 when we traveled to East Berlin via subway from the West. East Germany was not recognized by the West as a sovereign state. This meant that when we arrived in the East, the border guards could look at our passports, but could not hold them in their own hands to do so. When we arrived in East Berlin the guards asked my father for our passports. We were there as a family. My father stubbornly refused, and just held them up so they could see them. I remember feeling proud of him at that moment. "To hell with you, he seemed to be saying. You don't control my life and my family's life. I control it." The guards yielded.

My father was deeply affected throughout the later years of his life by the events in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. His memory of those days was like a specter haunting him until the final days of his life. Yet, despite his persistent fear that those days might return, he also seemed to construct his life in defiance of those times and memories. There is a lesson to be learned here.

My father was born in 1919 in a city in Germany called Gotha. I found the name of that city inscribed on a glass wall at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum here in Washington when I took one of my college classes there a few years ago. Gotha was one of the many cities decimated in Europe during the holocaust. At the age of 15, my father's parents sent him to live with an aunt in Albany, N.Y. They did this because life was beginning to be too dangerous in Germany then. It was a wise decision on their part. He could easily have been killed as a young Jewish man by the Nazis. This was the last time he saw his father. That was in 1934.

The dangerousness in Germany, coupled with the loss of his father, and a feeling of helplessness while in America hearing about what was happening in Germany then, plus not really knowing what was happening in Germany then, created a wound in my father's soul, a wound that was difficult for him to heal. Yet, in some ways, particularly about a week before he died, he seemed to come to grips with this wound in a deep way. I will explain.

My father was raised a Jew and he seemed to stay one until his forced pilgrimage to America. Being a Jew was both significant and insignificant to him. His Jewish identity, though at times a mystery to me, was not a contradiction to him. He was Bar Mitzvah-ed in Germany. He was never a religious man. He seemed to enjoy some of the cultural traditions, however, he not only eschewed the ideology of Judaism, he became anti-religious. He became anti-religious because he considered religious ideology hypocritical and divisive. He kept that conviction relatively private because he did not want to offend others.

My father believed more in dog than in God. And dog, as my mother points out, is simply God spelled backwards.

His father, Alfred Schäler, was a director and teacher in the Thuringen school system in Germany. In some ways his father assumed the role of a rabbi in the community, though he had never been formally ordained as one. Soon after my father was sent to America his father was forced out of his position there because he was Jewish. He then took a position as director of a Jewish school in Dresden, but was arrested in his home in the middle of the night by the Gestapo during "Kristalnacht."

My Aunt Lottie, my father's sister, here with us today, told me how the Gestapo came into their home then and how they searched under her bed for "weapons." My grandfather was arrested that night and taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. She still has the precious piece of bread her father used to soak up rain water in while at Buchenwald. He used this to quench his thirst in order to survive there.

Oddly, my grandfather was released a few weeks later, probably because he had received an Iron Cross for service to Germany during World War I. Thus, the paradox: My father's father was persecuted by the Germans as a Jew, and yet freed for his loyalty to Germany. My Aunt tells me of how she and her mother heard a sound at the gate to their house during the night and found my grandfather there. He was badly beaten by the Gestapo and she remembers how they bathed him and took care of his wounds. Soon thereafter my grandfather escaped to England. That was in 1939. Because he was German, he lived for awhile in an internment camp there. Again, the paradox or double-bind: He was allowed into England because he was a Jew seeking political asylum. But he was placed in an internment camp because he was German and considered a potential threat to England.

So many people in my generation, and my daughter's generation, seem to have either forgotten, are indifferent, or are unaware of just how dangerous socialism had become in Europe then. My father felt a tremendous amount of fear and helplessness during that period of time. He could do nothing from America to help his parents and sister. My Aunt Lottie and her mother tried very hard to get out of Germany after their father had escaped, but it was not easy. Finally, they managed to escape by sealed train to Portugal. They were locked in as prisoners on the crowded and sealed train for days. There was no bathroom on the train. At one point, when they crossed over the border to Spain, her train car was uncoupled and isolated. People moved the car back an forth with hopes the Allied forces would bomb the train car with the Jews, thinking it belonged to the enemies. In Portugal they boarded a ship and arrived in New York in 1941. That was the kind of world they lived in back then.

I remember asking my father years ago, as I did on so many occasions, what it was like in Germany before he left. He never wanted to talk about it much. I asked him how such a thing could have happened, what were people thinking? I remember him saying to me "no one believed it could happen." I took those words to heart and have committed myself to tracing the "pedigree of ideas" leading to such terrible activities, as well as to challenging socialist thinking wherever and whenever I can.

In this way I have forged my father's fears into a metaphorical sword, determined to avenge the wound not only the Nazis created in my father, but also, by example, the wound I inherited from him.

About a year ago, my father re-read the important letters he saved from his father during the years from 1939 to 1943. He showed them to each member of our family and at times seemed obsessed with them. But what he was obsessed with, from my point of view, was communicating a comprehension of those times to future generations as a legacy. Comprehend the meaning of those times, he seemed to be saying, and hold on to not only the precious memories of what those times sought to destroy, hold on to a vigilance and determination never to allow them to flourish again.

They are letters full of love from a father for his son It was the last contact he had with his father. My grandfather died en route to join his family in the U.S. when his ship, part of a North Atlantic Convoy, sank in 1943. I do not know whether his ship sank because of a storm or because it was torpedoed. I suspect the latter. For some mysterious reason my father told me both over the years--sometimes he said the ship sank in a storm, sometimes he said it was torpedoed by a submarine.

My father died from complications related to a neuro-degenerative disease. We don't know exactly what he had, but it was pretty bad. First we thought he had Alzheimer's disease. But now it doesn't look as though he did. He definitely seemed to have some type of Parkinson's disease, and perhaps he developed a form of dementia that was part of his Parkinson's. In any event it was a miserable decline and the past few years have been very difficult for all of us.

What happens in that process is that one's memory declines rapidly. With the loss of memory comes the loss of who we call the person. Person and memory are synonymous. He began to disappear with the loss of his own memory. He now lives on in our memories.

I close now by sharing with you a few brief, yet I believe profoundly significant conversations and exchanges I had with my father during the final months and days of his life. Instead of explaining the meaning of these exchanges, I will just leave them with you to interpret anyway you see fit. Understand that my father's dementia made it near impossible for him to express a complete sentence, except for on rare occasions. These exchanges all happened at the Avalon house nursing home.

One time I was trying to get him in a wheelchair and we were having a difficult time. I was growing slightly impatient. His Parkinson's made it very difficult for him to move, to sit down, to move his legs, etc. At times I had to push a little more than he liked, otherwise the job would have taken forever. I said "come on Dad, work with me." He looked at me and said "why are you such an angry person?" I stopped and just looked at him.

Another time I was putting him to bed. Everything was difficult. Yet he seemed appreciative as I pulled the covers up and he settled in to sleep, one of the greatest comforts he had left to experience, aside from eating. "I love you Dad," I said to him. "Same here," he said back to me. "How come you never say you love me Dad," I countered. "It's automatic," he said. "No," I said. "It's not the same thing. You always say 'same here,' or 'I feel the same way,' or some variation on that, but you never actually say 'I love you.' How come you never, in my whole life, ever say 'I love you?" He looked at me as though he thought I was being a pain in the ass, sighed and said "I L-O-V-E you." I laughed and said OK. Still he wouldn't say it, but I guess spelling it out was close enough.

On January 18, Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, I stayed with him for a few hours in the evening. He was very anxious and agitated, and I gave him an herbal preparation that calmed him down remarkably. Following dinner I took him to his bedroom so we could spend our time alone together. I remember him sitting on his bed with his arms wrapped around his knees and I thought to myself, this is like we're sitting on a beach together. We listened to the radio. A choir was singing "We shall Overcome" from the Ebenezeer Baptist Church in Atlanta and I told him about how I had visited there last summer. He was having a very difficult time speaking a complete sentence. "How do you feel Dad," I asked. "I feel good," he replied, and I believed him. I began to talk to him seriously, as I had on a couple of occasions. "Dad, I'm going to say a few things to you assuming you can understand what I'm saying, even though I know it's very difficult for you to talk. You know, we are very sorry you've had to go through what you have, this illness has been terrible, and we've tried to do everything we can to make life easier. You've been a good father, and a good husband to Mom, and you've taken care of your family well. Thank you."

And we sat silently together for awhile, listening to the music. Then he scooted toward the edge of the bed, and struggling to get up said to me "I love you and I am going to heal you."

And so he has. And so, the torch, not the wound, is passed.