Athlete survived Olympics’ darkest day
FENCER Dan Alon was one of only five survivors of the slaughter of Israeli athletes by the Black September Palestinian terror group at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Shortly before dawn on September 5, eight terrorists travelled to the Olympic village and made their way to the apartments housing the Israelis. They used stolen keys to get into two properties, the first of which contained the coaches. One of them, Moshe Weinberg, was shot in the mouth before being forced at gunpoint to lead the terrorists to other members of the team.
He said that the flat where Alon and other physically slight athletes were staying contained no Israelis and led them to the one where the wrestlers and weightlifters were staying, possibly hoping that the stronger men might be able to overpower the Palestinians.
But they were asleep and unable to act. A dozen hostages were taken but one of them, Gad Zabari, managed to escape, helped by the wounded Weinberg, who was shot dead and his body thrown naked on to the street.
The others were taken into a single bedroom where weightlifter Yossef Romano, who fought back, was shot and left to bleed to death. The terrorists then handed police a demand for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, plus imprisoned German terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in return for handing over the remaining hostages.
Alon later said that they 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.” He could see a terrorist in a balaclava on the balcony of the next-door flat and considered using the guns in their flat belonging to the shooting team.
But they were worried about the consequences and instead managed to escape, while in the early hours of September 6, the nine remaining Israeli hostages were butchered. A German policeman also died.
“Everything was covered in blood,” Alon later said about going back to collect his colleagues’ possessions. “There were children’s books and other stuff that athletes had purchased to take home. It was a sad day for me.”
After retiring from sport he became general director of a plastics company in Tel Aviv. In 2012 the former Olympian, who died of cancer, published Munich Memoir: Dan Alon’s Untold Story Of Survival. He is survived by his wife and three children.