My Father Was An Alcoholic

My dad didn’t drink during World War II.  He was a Polish slave laborer in Buchenwald Concentration Camp for four years, and in the camps there wasn’t much drinking or even eating.  Right after the camps were liberated, however, he searched for something to drink and found it.  Later in the refugee camps that he and my mom spent six years in, he ran a still and made booze as soon as he could set one up.

He drank for the next 30 years.  He didn’t drink on weekdays.  Weekdays were for working and making the money that the family needed to live in America.  He was absolutely sober those days.  He wouldn’t touch a drop.  

Weekends, however, were different. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why he drank, but now I do.  My dad drank because he was trying to push back the memory of all the terrible things he had seen in the war.  He hoped that the drinking would cut him off from his memories and from the outside world.  He wanted to isolate himself in that piece of himself that hadn't seen men castrated, women bayoneted in the breast, babies thrown in the air and shot.  He never found that peaceful place.  

So he drank.  Fridays when he came home from the factory where he worked, he would go to the kitchen and take out a bottle of vodka and fill a glass and sit down at the table and drink.  If anyone was in the kitchen with him, he would smile at them and say “to your health.”  He would finish that glass and then take another and another.  He would drink until he passed out.  Saturday, he would begin with beer in the morning and switch to vodka in the afternoon.  Sundays, after church, he’d go to the bar on the corner for his Sunday drink, a free glass of booze that would lead to another and another.  

The peace that he sought never came.  No matter how much he drank, the memories of the war still haunted him.  Sometimes, when he would pass out from the drinking, we could hear him in his sleep weeping or screaming from those memories.  

When he was 56 he realized that the drinking wasn’t helping him, and he sought out a psychiatrist.  He gave him Librium, a medication that’s supposed to relieve anxiety.  It didn't help my dad.  He went back to drinking, and the drinking got so bad that the psychiatrist talked about the possibility that my dad would have to be committed to an asylum of some kind.  

What finally saved him from drinking was my mom telling him she would leave him if he continued to drink.  He couldn't stand that thought.  Her leaving would have been his end, his suicide.  

She was his church.