One day in September

It was another beautiful summer day in Munich’s Olympic Village. Andre Spitzer and his wife Ankie were enjoying a walk, when they came across a group of Lebanese athletes. Spitzer was Israeli, their countries in a state of war with each other. But the young fencing coach didn’t care. He wanted to talk to them. When his wife tried to stop him, he told her: ‘Ankie, that’s exactly what the Olympics are all about. Here I can go to them, I can talk to them, I can ask them how they are.’ And so he went. They talked, smiled at each other, shook hands, and when he came back to his wife, he said, smiling broadly: ‘You see, this is what I was dreaming about. I knew it was going to happen.’

A few days later, Andre Spitzer’s dream ended…

45 years ago, on September 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists entered the Olympic Village and took eleven members of the Israeli team as hostages, demanding the release of 234 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, as well as German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction (RAF). They killed two of their hostages that morning, the other nine died during at botched rescue attempt at the airfield of Fürstenfeldbruck. The horrible events of that darkest day in Olympic history are well known. They have been told again and again from all possible perspectives. And still, they are worth retelling. More than that. The Olympic Family, and especially sports officials and fans here in Germany, have an obligation to remember what happened and to never forget those who came to us as friends, gifted athletes, skilled coaches and officials, Olympians, and who returned home in coffins.

Their names are inscribed in the book of history and indeed on several monuments and commemorative plaques. But to me it appears that we far too often only remember and report on their last few hours, their last moments.

I would like to contribute to changing that:

Moshe Weinberg

Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg was born in Haifa in 1939, at that time part of the British mandate of Palestine. Weinberg had a successful career in his sport, winning the Israeli youth championship and reigning as Israeli champion (on the senior level) for eight consecutive years. In 1965 he won the gold medal at the Maccabiah Games. During his active career, he already began working as a teacher for physical education and a wrestling coach at the Wingate Institute and Hapoel Tel Aviv. It was in his capacity as Israeli national coach that he travelled to Munich. Less than a month before the Games, his wife Miriam gave birth to their son. Guri Weinberg would later play his own father in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie ‘Munich’.

Yossef Romano

Born in Benghazi, Libya, Yossef Romano and his family made ‘aliyah’ (i.e. immigrated to the Land of Israel) in 1946, when he was six years old. They moved to Herzliya where his family ran a grocery store.  In 1967 he served in the Israeli Military during the Six-Day War. An interior decorater by profession, Romano won nine national Weightlifting titles in both the lightweight and middleweight divisions. On the international level he represented his country in the 1965 World Championships in Iran and the 1969 tournament in Poland. As the Weightlifting events in Munich began on August 31, 1972, Romano was the first of the Israeli athletes to compete. But a torn ligament in his knee meant an early exit from competition. Spending the next few days with his teammates in the Olympic Village, he was due to return to Israel on September 6, to undergo surgery. Yossef Romano was survived by his wife Ilana and their three daughters.

Ze’ev Friedman

Ze’ev Friedman actually began his career as a gymnast. Born in the Siberian town of Prokopyevsk in 1944, he came to Israel in 1960. Soon afterwards he switched to Weightlifting, a sport in which he excelled. Seven national championships, a remarkable seventh place at the World Championships in 1969 and a Bronze Medal at the 1971 Asian Championships, made him one of the most likely candidates among the Israeli athletes to win an Olympic medal at Munich. While Friedman, who worked as a teacher at Kiryat Haim, a suburb of Haifa, achieved ‘only’ a twelfth place in his event, he set three new national records during the competition.

David Berger

Benjamin Berger used to tell his son that he ‘may not be the best weightlifter in the world, but certainly the smartest’. And indeed, David Mark Berger, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1944, had quite an excellent education. After graduating from Shaker Heights High School, Berger attended Tulane University in New Orleans. Weightlifting had been a part of his life early on. He began competing at age 12 and wrote down the details of each and every lift during his training in a diary, using words such as “easy”, “ugly” or “ouch”. Having won the NCAA weightlifting title in his junior year, Berger graduated from Tulane with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1966. He managed to combine his studies with his athletic career and enrolled in a combined MBA-law degree program at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1969. In the very same year, after winning the gold medal in the Maccabiah Games, Berger decided to move to Israel and open a law office in Tel Aviv after the completion of his military service. Still, that didn’t stop him from pursuing his Weightlifting career, which earned him a silver medal at the 1971 Asian Championships. He also took up a job as a coach for Paralympic athletes in Jerusalem, at a time when sports for people with a disability was much less regarded than today. Participating in the Munich Olympics was the fulfillment of a life-long dream. His siblings, Fred and Barbara Berger, visited him in the Olympic Village on September 4, while their parents stayed at home in Ohio. When his sister asked him, when they would see each other again, David Berger jokingly replied: ‘I’ll be home for weddings and funerals.’

Yakov Springer

Yakov Springer was born in Poland in 1921. During the Holocaust, he escaped from his native country (there are reports that he actually escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto, but I couldn’t find a reliable source to confirm this) and moved to Moscow. He was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, while his brothers, sisters, German-born father and mother were all killed. In Moscow he met his future wife Rosa. They returned to Warsaw after the war, where Springer worked for the Ministry for Sports, before finally moving to Israel with their two children in 1957. Working as a Weightlifting coach and judge, he attended four Olympic Games before coming to Munich in 1972. Attending the Games in Germany, less than 30 years after his family had been wiped out by the Nazis, was of special significance to him and he saw his participation as a symbolic gesture of defiance and a triumph of life over death.

Eliezer Halfin

Halfin was 24 when he came to Munich. Born in Riga, Latvia (then Soviet Union), in 1948, he took up wrestling at the young age of 10. His father, whose first wife and children died within the Riga Ghetto, was the last member of the Halfin family alive after World War II had ended. Eliezer Halfin himself earned some success on the junior level before moving to Israel in 1969. He trained with Hapoel Tel Aviv and soon improved his wrestling skills. A twelfth place at the World Championships in 1971 was followed by a second and a third place in two international tournaments in Romania and Greece respectively. Halfin became an Israeli citizen a mere seven months before the Games. His traineeship as an auto mechanic with Volkswagen also ended immediately before his departure to Munich. During his competition he reached round three where he was pinned almost five minutes into the match by Hungarian József Rusznyák.

Yossef Gutfreund

Originally, wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund wanted to become a veterinarian. He attended medical school in his native Romania but came in contact with wrestling very soon and ultimately decided to follow a different path. Aged 17, in 1948, he emigrated to the newly founded State of Israel. After his active wrestling career, he worked as a coach for Betar Club Gym and ran an electronics store in Jerusalem. He was married and had two daughters. Gutfreund served with the Israel Defense Forces during both the Sinai War in 1956 and the Six-Day War, eleven years later. During the latter conflict he allegedly saved the lives of a group of Egyptian soldiers, who had been abandoned by their officers. Gutfreund tended to their burns and organized food and water for them. When the Palestinian terrorists tried to enter the Israeli team quarters in Connollystrasse 31, it was Gutfreund who threw himself against the door and screamed to wake up his teammates. These precious few seconds allowed weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolsky and race walker Shaul Ladany to escape unharmed. Sokolsky later said about his roommate and friend: ‘Yossef had the first premonition of danger on that fateful September morning. He blocked the door to our room with his massive body shouting at me to escape. He was aptly named. He was a good friend. I owe him my life.’

Kehat Shorr

Kehat Shorr, born in Romania in 1919, was an expert marksman. He was a nine-time national champion in Romania during his active career. But his skills were also tested on a different and far more dangerous level. During World War II, Shorr was an active member of the jewish resistance in Romania, escaping internment by hiding in the Carpathian mountains. Together with other partisans he organized several raids on Nazi-occupied cities and villages to rescue other jews in hiding. After the war, Shorr took up more civilian occupations, working as an insurance salesman and later in his life as a civil servant for Israel’s Defense Ministry. Sport shooting remained his hobby and after he arrived in Israel in 1963 he realized that it was almost non-existent there. Shorr saw this as just another challenge, settled in Tel Aviv, became a member of Hapoel Tel Aviv and organized Israel’s very first sport shooting department. He had personally trained and prepared the two sport shooters, Zelig Shtroch and Henry Herskowitz, who participated in Munich. Kehat Shorr was survived by his wife and his daughter.

Mark Slavin

Mark Slavin was born in Minsk in 1954. During his childhood and youth he enjoyed playing the accordion, painting the forested landscape outside his hometown, and singing Jewish and Russian folk-songs as well as songs of his favourite Elvis Presley. But his athletic potential became also visible early on. His parents originally wanted him to take up Tennis, an ambitious and at that time somewhat unusual choice for a boy from the Soviet Union. But it was his physical strength that drew the attention of Soviet sports officials and recruiters. At age 14 he attended the ‘Palace of Sports’, an elite school in Minsk, and took up Greco-Roman Wrestling. And there was something else that made young Mark turn his interest towards combat sports. On a day-by-day basis, Mark and his younger brother Elik were subjected to anti-semitic taunts and often violent attacks. He learned to defend himself and his younger brother. But that was not enough. The anti-semitism he encountered was institutionalised. Not just a few boys from the neighbourhood, the entire system placed numerous obstacles in their path. His sport gave him a certain degree of freedom, especially after winning the 1971 Soviet junior championships. But still he felt like a second-class citizen. A few days after his 18th birthday he filed a request for a visa to Israel. Although he intended to emigrate alone, in the end his entire family joined him, just four months before the Olympic Games in Munich. Upon arrival in Israel, Mark Slavin immediately went to Hapoel Tel Aviv’s Wrestling training facility and introduced himself as the junior champion of the USSR. The coaches, among them Moshe Weinberg, were more than impressed when he proved his proficiency by defeating experienced wrestlers from any weight division, and it didn’t take long until he got nominated for the Israeli Olympic team. His Olympic debut was scheduled to be on September 5, 1972.

Andre Spitzer

Fencing master Andre Spitzer was born in Timisoara, Romania, in 1945. After the death of his father, he and his mother moved to Israel, when he was eleven years old. Spitzer attended the National Sport Academy, specializing in fencing. A few years later he went to the Netherlands to work as a fencing instructor in The Hague. One of his students was a young Dutch woman named Ankie. She had been to Israel a short while ago and spent some time at a kibbutz. During a long and demanding session, and not knowing that her teacher was Israeli, she yelled the Hebrew word ‘Maspik!‘ (‘enough!’) in frustration. Andre Spitzer looked up, smiled and invited her to lunch… It didn’t take long for them to fall in love with each other. They married and moved to Israel. In August 1972, Ankie Spitzer gave birth to their daughter Anouk. As the Olympic Games were approaching, Andre Spitzer travelled to Munich with his team, while Ankie went to her parents in the Netherlands, who would take care of baby Anouk for the next week, before she joined her husband in Munich. A few days later, Ankie’s brother, a pediatrician, told her that he had to take their daughter to a hospital for observation. Ankie and Andre Spitzer left Munich as soon as possible. They spent two days in the hospital, before being assured by doctors that their daughter would be fine. Andre wanted to stay with his young family, but his wife insisted that he should rejoin his teammates in Munich. She drove him to Eindhoven’s train station, some 30 kilometers away, where he reached the last train to Munich just as it was about to leave. He arrived at the Olympic Village in the middle of the night. It was the night of September 5, 1972…

Amitzur Shapira

Athletics coach Amitzur Shapira, born in Tel Aviv in 1932, was an excellent sprinter and long jumper during his active career in the 1950s, but his greatest successes would come as a coach. He went on to work as a teacher at the Wingate Institute. It was in this capacity, that he discovered a talented young runner, named Esther Shahamorov. Shapira became her coach or rather, as she put it later, a ‘father-figure’. In 1970 she won her first two gold medals at the Asian Games. She missed out on the 100m final in Munich by a fraction of a second, before becoming the first Israeli in any event to qualify for an Olympic final, four years later in Montreal (now named Esther Roth), when she finished 6th in the 100m. Her time of 11,45 seconds during the first round heat in Munich still is the Israeli national record over 100m. Amitzur Shapira was survived by his wife and four children. More than four decades later, his grandson, the author and artist Shahak Shapira, would rise to a certain level of prominence in Germany. Partly for his autobiographical book, in which he writes about his childhood and youth in Israel and Germany, his experiences with anti-semitism, as well as the death of his grandfather, but also for his political activities, especially against racist, anti-semitic, islamophobic and homophobic tendencies in far-right groups and political parties.

Tomorrow, on September 6, 2017, 45 years after IOC President Avery Brundage uttered the famous words ‘The Games must go on’, a memorial will be opened to the public in Munich’s Olympic Park. It is a large green hill with a cut, like an open wound in the landscape. An open wound, filled with memories. On the exhibition area, some 500 square meters large, you’ll find a large LED wall, showing newsreel material from 1972, as well as a triangular column displaying biographical profiles of all the victims. The President of Israel, Reuben Rivlin, will take part in the ceremony tomorrow, as will his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier and IOC President Thomas Bach. And maybe, after 45 years, this will be the start of a new approach by the Olympic Movement towards remembering the events of 1972, something that many relatives of the murdered Israelis have been fighting for throughout all those years. Especially one of them, who I deeply admire for her persistence and strength, and who said this about the new memorial in Munich:

“It took 45 years, but like I tell my kids, if you have a dream, pursue it, if you feel that it is just.”

Ankie Spitzer