Fifty-four years ago today, in the early hours of 6 September 1972, nine Israeli hostages were killed at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield outside Munich, along with a West German police officer, Anton Fliegerbauer, and five of the men who had taken them. Two members of the Israeli team had been killed the day before, in the Olympic Village.
That morning a memorial service was held in the Olympic Stadium. The flags flew at half-mast and some eighty thousand people sat in silence.
The eleven were Moshe Weinberg, Yossef Romano, Yossef Gutfreund, Kehat Shorr, Andre Spitzer, Amitzur Shapira, Yakov Springer, Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin, David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman. Coaches, referees, wrestlers, weightlifters, a fencing master, a marksman. They had come to compete.
The facts are enough. I will leave them here.
Thank you for reading the names, Marguerite. There are memorial stones now at Fürstenfeldbruck and in the Olympic park in Munich, and the names are read aloud there each year; in Jewish practice a visitor leaves a small stone behind, so that the dead are known to have been visited.
Thank you, Marguerite. The rest of the Israeli team left for home later that day, and their teammates carried the kit of the men who could not travel with them.