“Munich after massacre”, on TV history: fight of a life

Fifty years after taking hostages which will cost life to eleven Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games, four women tell their existence upset.

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The party promised to be grandiose at the end of summer 1972. For the first time in history, the Olympic Games, in this case those of Munich, Germany, were broadcast live from August 26 by television channels around the world.

Ankie Spitzer, the young Dutch wife of Andre Spitzer, coach of Israeli fencers, accompanied her husband in Bavaria, in the company of their little girl. “The Olympic village was really an ideal place, she recalls. The athletes met, chatted, danced. One day, Andre recognized the Lebanese fencers and wanted to speak to them. I told him that he had lost his mind Because at the time, Israel was at war with Lebanon. They laughed together, as if the war did not exist … “

On September 5, at dawn, eight Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September group enter the Olympic village. In a few hours, the operation will cost the life of eleven Israelis including Andre, the husband of Ankie. Five of the terrorists will be killed.

rebuild

This drama, lived live and in real time by the whole world, will have deeply upset the lives of the four women including this a little too long documentary, lacking in hindsight but sometimes moving, draws portraits.

If the courses of Marianne Gladnikoff and Sylvia Rafael, two agents of the Mossad, and the sprinter Esther Roth-Shachamorov having lost her coach during the Munich killing, lack thickness, the portrait of Ankie Spitzer, who spent his life fighting so that the victims of Munich are not forgotten, worth the detour.

How to live after such a drama? How to honor the memory of the victims, rebuild? “After Munich, my parents wanted me to return to the Netherlands. But it was in Israel that I had to live. If I had lived in a pretty little house in Amsterdam, I could never have explained to my daughter who was her father and how had arrived, “explains the one who became a journalist in charge of the Near East for Dutch and Belgian media.

Relentlessly, this woman will fight so that the International Olympic Committee reminds the world of the memory of the eleven victims of September 1972. At the Atlanta Games in 1996, she took the fourteen children who lost their father in Munich. But it was not until 2016, at the Rio Games, that the IOC finally organizes a ceremony of tribute to the victims.

“I still have one thing to do, launches Ankie who underlines the incompetence of the security forces during the tragedy. I want an independent investigation committee to be created to shed light on what s ‘has passed. This story is not limited to eight Palestinians who kill Eleven Israelis. “The fight of a life.

/Media reports.