My dad died two days ago. I'm going to share a part of his life that was important, but didn't define him. His kindness did that.

He immigrated from Germany as a young boy, the son of a Ukrainian WW2 refugee and a U.S. Army officer with a family in the States. His mother, a bulldog, wrote letters to this officer until he agreed to help them come to America on the condition that she never contact him again.

She was also a virulent racist, and she tried to instill that in my dad. She failed. He served in the Navy in Vietnam, came home to Virginia, worked as a mover, started an office moving company and started dating a veterinarian he met at a bar in DuPont Circle.

He avoided telling his mother about her because she was black. One day she called to say she was coming over to drop something off. He said, "great, you can meet my girlriend, who's black."

She didn't contact him after that for five years, except when she mailed him a box full of his childhood photos, defaced. On each photo, she wrote "NIGGER LOVER" in black sharpie across his face. Only two or three pictures of him as a young man survived. This was one.

I didn't meet her until I was a teenager. She came back to my dad when she needed money to keep her townhouse (his moving company was doing well). I interviewed her one time. She justified the Holocaust. She expressed support for Nazis who came through her town and arrested Jews.

I pity racists more than I blame them, because I've long believed we are all products of our environment. So I find it incredible that my dad escaped this woman and her ideology. He never had any big, satisfying explanation...

He met black men in the Navy and worked with Black men as a mover and at some point he just decided she was wrong about Black people. I find myself thinking about this aspect of his life as I look at images of men waving confederate flags in the U.S. Capitol.

So, it was a life extraordinarily lived. To his abundance of independence, intelligence and compassion, I owe my entire existence. Love you, dad.

One more thing: his name was Alexander Robert Klemko. My son’s name will be Jack Alexander, after his great grandfather on his mother’s side who survived the Holocaust, and my dad.