I Sleep in Hitler's Room by Tuvia Tenenbom

Author:Tuvia Tenenbom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Jewish Theater of New York

•••

I might be a little psychotic. After I leave the blessed kids I go to see heroin shooters. Don’t ask me to explain this.

The heroin here, where I’ve just arrived, is legal. It’s a government program that allows addicts to inject themselves with heroin, supplied by the government.

As I enter the premises, a man tells me that “one hundred people, plus or minus five, get heroin shots here every day, and a hundred others get methadone treatment.”

The youngest person treated here is twenty-three years old, and the average age is forty. All who come here have tried other treatments and failed. They come up to three times daily, get heroin at a supervised dosage—the max is 900 milligrams daily—and they inject themselves.

Werner Heinz, the person responsible for the psychological social services here, says it’s important that the people feel they are not excluded from society. Many of the patients, as Heinz calls them, started taking drugs at the age of twelve or thirteen, and “they stopped their biography,” as he puts it.

I assume there’s a psychological need in you that makes you work with these people. What is it?

“I feel an intellectual challenge working with them.”

Give me more!

“I come from the left side of society, politically. There is an anger that I carry with me. In 1968, I was sixteen years old, and 1968 influenced me a lot. The early writings of Marx influenced me, and I acquired sympathy for the Third World. The Third World is far away, but a counterpart to that world is here, with the heroin people.”

Werner also tells me that when people start using heroin, “what they experience will take a normal person twenty years of meditation in the Himalayas to experience.” The problem is that with time this effect evaporates and all that remains is a terrible addiction.

Dr. Hamid Zokai, who is the psychiatrist here, enters the room.

Why are you here?

“I had a lot of personal problems, I had a personal crisis at the time.”

I love it! You can’t get it better than a psychiatrist sharing with you his deep neurotic, maybe even psychotic secrets. My face lights up like that of a child with ice cream.

Werner, seeing my happy face, warns Dr. Hamid that everything he says will be read by many Germans.

Dr. Hamid thinks about this and decides not to talk about himself. Too bad. Werner, with his Third World dreams, put the fear of God in Dr. Hamid’s heart, depriving me of a first-rate story today!

But there’s no time to think about this. It’s feeding time. One by one the addicts enter the building.

My phone rings. What timing!

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