Olympic Silence
Forty years after 11 athletes were murdered in Munich, Israel still mourns alone.
I was 11 years old and a fanatical sports fan. I could stay glued to the TV and radio for hours on end, rooting for my hometown teams. The pinnacle sporting event was the Olympics, providing not only a panoply of world-class athletics, but a once-in-four-year opportunity to root for my “special Jewish home team”: Israel.
The 1972 Munich Olympics started with a bang. Mark Spitz, the mustachioed Jewish-American swimmer (who proudly participated in Israel’s Maccabiah Games) entered seven swimming events - and promptly set an incredible seven world records in the course of winning a record seven gold medals.
For American Jews, this was a huge source of pride. The last Olympics held on German soil - the 1936 Games in Berlin - were exploited as a Nazi showcase festooned with goose-stepping and swastikas. Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism infected the athletic events as well: Two Jewish-American runners - Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller - were removed from the U.S. lineup at the last second, thus becoming the only members of the U.S. squad to travel to Berlin and not compete. For the racist Nazis, it was enough that a black man - Jesse Owens - had won the prestigious 100-meter dash; Hitler reportedly asked U.S. officials not to embarrass him any further by having two Jews win gold in Berlin.
Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism directly infected the athletic events.
The 1972 Munich games promised to usher in a new era of global sportsmanship. Ankie Spitzer, the wife of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, told Aish.com how they spotted some Lebanese athletes in Munich. “Andre decided to walk over and strike up a conversation with them. I told him, ‘Are you crazy? We’re at war with Lebanon!’ Andre looked at me and said, ‘Here there are no borders, no animosities.’ I’ll never forget when he finished speaking with them and shaking hands, he turned toward me with a huge smile said, ‘I’ve been dreaming of this. This is exactly what the Olympics are all about.’”
The atmosphere was open and free; the security guards did not even carry weapons. (Compare to this year's London Olympics whose billion-dollar security force includes facial recognition technology, scrambling jets and surface-to-air missiles.) At the opening ceremonies, as a symbol of peace and unity, thousands of Bavarian doves were released into the Olympic stadium.
The Munich Games were viewed as a rectification of another kind as well. Several members of the Israeli Olympic team either had family members murdered by the Nazis, or were themselves survivors. Weightlifter Ze'ev Friedman was born in Poland at the height of the war; weightlifting coach Yakov Springer participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; race-walker Shaul Ladany was interned in Bergen-Belsen. The Munich Games were held just 15 miles from the Dachau concentration camp, and a contingent of Israeli athletes visited on the eve of the Games, confident that these secure, serene Olympics would lay to rest some of the 6 million demons. Israeli sprinter Esther Roth - whose outstanding performance at the Munich Games (11.45 seconds in the 100-meter dash) still stands four decades later as the Israeli national record - spoke of a historical triumph in representing the Jewish State on German soil.
Scaling the Fence
And then it happened. At 5 a.m. on September 5th, eight Palestinians - disguised as athletes and carrying gym bags decorated with the Olympic rings - scaled the fence of the Olympic Village. Those bags contained not running shoes, but Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades. Using stolen keys, they broke into the Israeli men’s dormitory, quickly killed two athletes, and took nine others hostage.
In one moment, the Olympic ideal had burst into a horrific collision of unity versus destruction, peace versus war. I was frightened and confused, my youthful innocence shattered with that first bitter taste of Jewish life's most painful realities.
My parents tried to calm me down, assuring me that everything would be alright. With a mixture of fear and confusion I waited moment by moment, hour after hour, as deadlines passed and the drama played out to a worldwide audience of one billion: Palestinian terrorists in frightening ski masks… threatening to execute one Israeli every hour… an attempt to storm the building called off when the terrorists themselves began monitoring these developments by watching live television coverage… demanding a plane to Cairo… the transfer of all terrorists and hostages by helicopter to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck airfield… and the growing uncertainty of what would be.
A shootout erupted at the airport. Initial reports came in: All the hostages were alive. All the attackers killed.
What was only a rumor had cruelly mutated into fact. Israeli newspapers hit the streets bearing banner headlines: “Hostages in Munich Rescued.” Ankie Spitzer, watching the drama unfold at her parents' house in Belgium, was offered a bottle of champagne. Prime Minister Golda Meir went to bed believing that German forces had rescued the nine athletes.
With a sense of enormous relief, I went to bed, too.
When I awoke, the look on my father's face told me that something was horribly wrong. The German plan to save the hostages had been botched in every conceivable way. A group of 17 police officers who'd been positioned on the airplane to ambush the terrorists cowardly abandoned their mission at the last minute. German law precluded any involvement by the army, and the Germans stubbornly refused the assistance of Israeli special forces. The rescue effort was led by Munich's Chief of Police, who'd been charged with involuntary manslaughter after blundering a bank robbery months earlier.
Incredibly, three weeks before the massacre, an informant told the German Embassy in Beirut about Palestinian plans for "an incident" during the Olympics. Four days later, the German Foreign Ministry alerted Munich authorities and advised them to "take all possible security measures." (The measures were never taken; the evidence suppressed for decades.)
The rescue team - consisting of just five snipers - was wholly inadequate to neutralize the eight terrorists. None of the snipers possessed specialized training, nor were they equipped with night-vision goggles or telescopic sights. They had no radio contact, thus unable to coordinate their fire. No armored vehicles were at the scene; those called in later got stuck in traffic. A SWAT team arrived by helicopter an hour late and landed more than a mile from the action.
In the chaotic two-hour gun battle, all nine Israeli athletes were killed, strafed by Palestinian gunfire, then torched by grenades as they sat helplessly bound in the helicopters.
Jim McKay of ABC delivered the heartbreaking news:
When I was a kid, my father used to say, "Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized." Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning; nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone.
All gone.
(Continued at the source)
I thought our community might be interested in this issue, especially in the claims that the "Olympics aren't political." I knew about the 1972 terrorism, but I didn't know that they still didn't have a moment of silence for the athletes killed at the Olympics.
Also, dear mods, please feel free to add any other relevant tags; I got a little overwhelmed by the number of tags we have. First post: if I did anything wrong please tell me!
I was 11 years old and a fanatical sports fan. I could stay glued to the TV and radio for hours on end, rooting for my hometown teams. The pinnacle sporting event was the Olympics, providing not only a panoply of world-class athletics, but a once-in-four-year opportunity to root for my “special Jewish home team”: Israel.
The 1972 Munich Olympics started with a bang. Mark Spitz, the mustachioed Jewish-American swimmer (who proudly participated in Israel’s Maccabiah Games) entered seven swimming events - and promptly set an incredible seven world records in the course of winning a record seven gold medals.
For American Jews, this was a huge source of pride. The last Olympics held on German soil - the 1936 Games in Berlin - were exploited as a Nazi showcase festooned with goose-stepping and swastikas. Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism infected the athletic events as well: Two Jewish-American runners - Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller - were removed from the U.S. lineup at the last second, thus becoming the only members of the U.S. squad to travel to Berlin and not compete. For the racist Nazis, it was enough that a black man - Jesse Owens - had won the prestigious 100-meter dash; Hitler reportedly asked U.S. officials not to embarrass him any further by having two Jews win gold in Berlin.
Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism directly infected the athletic events.
The 1972 Munich games promised to usher in a new era of global sportsmanship. Ankie Spitzer, the wife of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, told Aish.com how they spotted some Lebanese athletes in Munich. “Andre decided to walk over and strike up a conversation with them. I told him, ‘Are you crazy? We’re at war with Lebanon!’ Andre looked at me and said, ‘Here there are no borders, no animosities.’ I’ll never forget when he finished speaking with them and shaking hands, he turned toward me with a huge smile said, ‘I’ve been dreaming of this. This is exactly what the Olympics are all about.’”
The atmosphere was open and free; the security guards did not even carry weapons. (Compare to this year's London Olympics whose billion-dollar security force includes facial recognition technology, scrambling jets and surface-to-air missiles.) At the opening ceremonies, as a symbol of peace and unity, thousands of Bavarian doves were released into the Olympic stadium.
The Munich Games were viewed as a rectification of another kind as well. Several members of the Israeli Olympic team either had family members murdered by the Nazis, or were themselves survivors. Weightlifter Ze'ev Friedman was born in Poland at the height of the war; weightlifting coach Yakov Springer participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; race-walker Shaul Ladany was interned in Bergen-Belsen. The Munich Games were held just 15 miles from the Dachau concentration camp, and a contingent of Israeli athletes visited on the eve of the Games, confident that these secure, serene Olympics would lay to rest some of the 6 million demons. Israeli sprinter Esther Roth - whose outstanding performance at the Munich Games (11.45 seconds in the 100-meter dash) still stands four decades later as the Israeli national record - spoke of a historical triumph in representing the Jewish State on German soil.
Scaling the Fence
And then it happened. At 5 a.m. on September 5th, eight Palestinians - disguised as athletes and carrying gym bags decorated with the Olympic rings - scaled the fence of the Olympic Village. Those bags contained not running shoes, but Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades. Using stolen keys, they broke into the Israeli men’s dormitory, quickly killed two athletes, and took nine others hostage.
In one moment, the Olympic ideal had burst into a horrific collision of unity versus destruction, peace versus war. I was frightened and confused, my youthful innocence shattered with that first bitter taste of Jewish life's most painful realities.
My parents tried to calm me down, assuring me that everything would be alright. With a mixture of fear and confusion I waited moment by moment, hour after hour, as deadlines passed and the drama played out to a worldwide audience of one billion: Palestinian terrorists in frightening ski masks… threatening to execute one Israeli every hour… an attempt to storm the building called off when the terrorists themselves began monitoring these developments by watching live television coverage… demanding a plane to Cairo… the transfer of all terrorists and hostages by helicopter to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck airfield… and the growing uncertainty of what would be.
A shootout erupted at the airport. Initial reports came in: All the hostages were alive. All the attackers killed.
What was only a rumor had cruelly mutated into fact. Israeli newspapers hit the streets bearing banner headlines: “Hostages in Munich Rescued.” Ankie Spitzer, watching the drama unfold at her parents' house in Belgium, was offered a bottle of champagne. Prime Minister Golda Meir went to bed believing that German forces had rescued the nine athletes.
With a sense of enormous relief, I went to bed, too.
When I awoke, the look on my father's face told me that something was horribly wrong. The German plan to save the hostages had been botched in every conceivable way. A group of 17 police officers who'd been positioned on the airplane to ambush the terrorists cowardly abandoned their mission at the last minute. German law precluded any involvement by the army, and the Germans stubbornly refused the assistance of Israeli special forces. The rescue effort was led by Munich's Chief of Police, who'd been charged with involuntary manslaughter after blundering a bank robbery months earlier.
Incredibly, three weeks before the massacre, an informant told the German Embassy in Beirut about Palestinian plans for "an incident" during the Olympics. Four days later, the German Foreign Ministry alerted Munich authorities and advised them to "take all possible security measures." (The measures were never taken; the evidence suppressed for decades.)
The rescue team - consisting of just five snipers - was wholly inadequate to neutralize the eight terrorists. None of the snipers possessed specialized training, nor were they equipped with night-vision goggles or telescopic sights. They had no radio contact, thus unable to coordinate their fire. No armored vehicles were at the scene; those called in later got stuck in traffic. A SWAT team arrived by helicopter an hour late and landed more than a mile from the action.
In the chaotic two-hour gun battle, all nine Israeli athletes were killed, strafed by Palestinian gunfire, then torched by grenades as they sat helplessly bound in the helicopters.
Jim McKay of ABC delivered the heartbreaking news:
When I was a kid, my father used to say, "Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized." Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning; nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone.
All gone.
(Continued at the source)
I thought our community might be interested in this issue, especially in the claims that the "Olympics aren't political." I knew about the 1972 terrorism, but I didn't know that they still didn't have a moment of silence for the athletes killed at the Olympics.
Also, dear mods, please feel free to add any other relevant tags; I got a little overwhelmed by the number of tags we have. First post: if I did anything wrong please tell me!