IT TOOK 45 YEARS, BUT IF YOU HAVE A DREAM, PURSUE IT.

Along the back wall, an LED screen, about 36 feet long, will play a 27-minute loop of news footage broadcast during the crisis. In the centre of the memorial, a triangular column will display biographical profiles of each victim in German and English, with photographs.

“Our design idea was to cut into the hill, to take something away from the landscape,” said Stephan Graebner, an architect at Brückner & Brückner, the German firm selected in 2014 to design the memorial. “When you think about the massacre, it took something away, cutting into the lives of the victims, the families, the Olympic Games. We wanted to fill this void with memory.”

Among the most poignant elements of the exhibition are the personal effects, one for each victim, that were photographed for the memorial.

There is, for example, a postcard that athlete Ze’ev Friedman sent to his parents from Munich before the attack. It arrived in their mailbox days after his death. There is a copy of a telegram that Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister at the time of the attack, sent to the United States to the parents of David Berger, an Israeli weightlifter who grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. “I know that no mortal word can assuage your grief,” Meir wrote to the Bergers, adding that “the pain is not only yours but that of a whole nation.”

Werner Karg, an official in the Bavarian ministry of culture, said it was unfortunate that haunting images of masked terrorists were more prominent in the public consciousness today than the memories, and the faces, of the victims. The memorial, he said, could help change that.

“We can show that these were individuals, ordinary people, not just names,” Karg said.

At the 2012 Olympics in London, the International Olympic Committee shut down widespread calls for a televised moment of silence during the opening ceremony to mark the 40th anniversary of the massacre, a decision that drew criticism from many quarters and improvised moments from others. On NBC’s broadcast of that ceremony, for instance, announcer Bob Costas paused his commentary for 12 seconds when the delegation from Israel entered the stadium, effectively creating his own moment of silence.

“Terrorist attacks and other outrages happen, sadly, on a constant basis,” Costas said in an interview. “But this one struck the Olympics itself. That’s what separated it: not that it was more tragic or more significant than others, but that it was directly tied to the Olympics.”

Progress started to come shortly thereafter. Spaenle, the Bavarian culture minister, met Spitzer and other victims’ families in 2012, months after the London Games, at a ceremony at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, where the hostage situation came to its tragic end. At that meeting, he pledged to work on the memorial project, and he met again with Spitzer and Romano several times in Germany and Israel.

Thomas Bach, who was elected president of the Olympic committee in 2013, proved more supportive of the families’ cause than his predecessors and backed the project, too. Bach, who won a gold medal in fencing for West Germany at the 1976 Games, also green-lighted the ceremony in the Olympic Village in Rio, where he read the names of the Munich victims.

“The murdered Israeli Olympians were victims of an attack at the heart of the Olympic Games and against all the Olympic values,” Bach said. “It is therefore fitting that these innocent victims should be remembered forever with a dignified memorial at a place close to the Olympic Village. It will be a symbol of remembrance and our shared grief.”

The memorial and exhibition cost about 2.4 million euros (more than US$2.8 million, according to Karg, with contributions from the Bavarian government, the German federal government, the Olympic committee and the Foundation for Global Sports Development, a U.S. organization focused on promoting sportsmanship.