Dan Alon
Olympic athlete who escaped the 1972 Munich massacre
DAN ALON, who has died aged 72, was one of only five Israeli athletes to survive a notorious massacre by the Black September Palestinian terror group at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
On September 4, midway through the games, most of the Israeli delegation went to the theatre before retiring to bed. A little after 4am the following morning, eight terrorists travelled to the Olympic Village.
They made their way to the block where most of the Israeli delegation was split over five flats. The front door was unlocked. First they forced their way into flat one, which housed the coaches. One, Moshe Weinberg, resisted and was shot in the mouth, wounded and forced at gunpoint to lead the terrorists to other members of the team. He took them past the flat housing Alon and other physically slight athletes to one where the wrestlers and weightlifters were staying, possibly hoping they might be able to overcome the Palestinians. But they were asleep and unprepared.
In all 12 hostages were taken, but as the wrestlers were led downstairs one of them, Gad Zabari, managed to escape, with the assistance of the wounded Weinberg. The latter was shot dead and his body thrown, naked, on to the street. The remaining 10 were shepherded into a single bedroom, where the weightlifter Yossef Romano, who attempted to overcome one of the intruders, was shot and left to bleed to death. A little after 5am the terrorists handed police a demand for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, plus the imprisoned German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in return for the release of the remaining hostages.
The first Alon knew of what was happening was when he woke up at 4.30am to “a big noise of explosions and shouting. Twenty minutes later we heard machine guns firing and the whole wall of the room was shaking.”
From the balcony of his room, he saw a terrorist in a balaclava on the balcony of the next-door flat. Alon and his four team-mates in the flat had guns belonging to the shooting team which they considered using. But they did not know what the consequences would be for their team-mates.
Instead, they crept down the wooden stairs of the building, jumped over a balcony and ran for it. Amazingly the terrorist on the balcony, who saw them running, did not shoot.
In the early hours of September 6, the nine remaining Israeli hostages were machine-gunned by their captors during a botched rescue attempt in which a German policeman was also killed.
Two days later Alon and his surviving team-mates had the traumatic task of packing up the belongings of the victims. “Everything was covered in blood,” he recalled. “There were children’s books and other stuff that athletes had purchased to take home. It was a sad day for me.”
Following the attack, Alon retired from fencing and for more than 30 years he could not talk about what he had seen. Following the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Munich in 2005, however, he was persuaded to break his silence. Talking about it, he said, had given him a sense of release.
Dan Alon was born on March 28 1945 in what became Israel, where his parents had fled in 1938. His father had been a European champion fencer and by the time Dan was selected for the Israeli Olympic team he was his country’s fencing champion. Alon won a few matches in the individual foil event at Munich, but was eliminated in round two.
Back in Israel, he went into industry, becoming general director of a plastics company in Tel Aviv. He coached fencing for several years, though he refused to fence competitively himself until he was 46 when some of his students persuaded him to have another go. He won an Israeli championship, then retired again.
He is survived by his wife and three children.
Dan Alon, born March 28 1945, died January 31 2018