The Tribune

By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

THE pieces of a 42-year-old puzzle fell into place last night when a surviving member of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team came face-to-face with members of the Bahamas delegation who were close by at the terrorism-scarred Games.

Organisers of the 1972 Olympics had hoped to use the Games to remove the bitter taste left by the 1936 Berlin Olympics; instead, as Dan Alon would say, “it killed the spirit of the Games”.

Mr Alon, one of seven survivors of the attack in which eight members of the Palestinian “Black September” terrorist organisation killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team, was at the Melia Nassau Beach Resort last night at the invitation of the Nassau Jewish community to share his perspective at a public meeting.

On September 5 ,1972, around 4.30am eight men dressed in tracksuits scaled a seven foot fence armed with assault rifles, pistols and grenades. The group, using stolen keys, gained access to an apartment building that housed several members of the Israeli team.

Shots rang out. Those that heard them, like Bahamian cyclist Jeffrey Burnside, assumed that they were fireworks, a part of some celebration near the Olympic village. In his account of the chaos that ensued he said: “I didn’t learn about the depth of what happen until I was miles away making my way back home, bitter over my leg injury,” he said last night.

Mr Burnside and other members of the Bahamas team were housed only 10-12 feet away from the Israeli group.

Gunmen entered the first Israeli apartment, instantly killing wrestling referee, Yossef Gutfreund, who in an attempt to block the masked men, braced his 300lb frame against the door. His actions gave his roommate, Tuvia Sokolovsky, time to escape.

The men accosted wrestling coach, Moshe Weinberg, and forced him to lead them to more Israeli athletes. Weinberg lead the group of armed assailants past the second apartment, where Mr Alon was billeted, telling the attackers that there were no Israeli athletes in that room.

Instead he led the men to apartment no.3, which housed six weightlifters and wrestlers, possibly believing that the stronger men would fare better in an altercation.

Mr Alon said that at this moment the men in his room knew they had three options: fight, escape or wait it out. He said: “We first decided to fight. We moved out on to my balcony where we could see one of the gunman.”

Mr Alon said the group soon determined that it made no sense to fight and decided to hatch a plan to escape. During the escape, one of his roommates, Yehuda Weisentein, made his way to a nearby building and alerted its occupants.

Bahamas Association of Athletic Associations’ president, Mike Sands, was one of the youngest members of the Bahamian team that year. He said: “I fell asleep near the balcony. I heard this knocking on the glass door and I popped up to see a man screaming in his underwear - he said his friends were being killed. I was confused. I panicked.

“We invited him around to the front and when we opened the door he told us what had taken place.”

According to Mr Sands, the members of the Bahamian delegation made the call to the authorities; as a result the world would the hear the stories of what unfolded in Munich that day.

Last night, the two sides of that Munich story finally came together. Mr Alon shared on-stage embraces with Mr Sands and Mr Burnside. “I never knew where Yehuda went to,” he said. “Now we all know.”

After killing two Israeli team members in the apartment, the terrorist group demanded helicopters and were airlifted to a nearby airport where a rescue attempt to save the remaining nine hostages failed, resulting in their death.

Mr Alon, a 27-year-old fencer at the time of the tragedy, said: “Munich was supposed to be different. It was suppose to be the beauty of competition on display; instead, Jewish blood was shed once again on German soil.

“The more I tell this story the better I feel. The world must remember what happened that day, I will never forget. But, through it all, Israel still lives on.”