By Joel Magalnick , Editor, JTNews
It’s only by luck that Dan Alon is alive today. Thirty-six years ago, at the age of 27, Alon looked up the barrel of a machine gun, straight into the eyes of a Black September terrorist — who himself was probably dead less than 24 hours later — then ran. Alon, as was the case with four of his fellow Olympians in Munich, West Germany, survived an attack that would eventually take the lives of 11 of his friends and colleagues.
Now 63, Alon came to Seattle on Nov. 7 to speak about his experience at Chabad at the University of Washington to a standing-room-only group of students from a few universities around the state.
Early on the morning of Sept. 5, 1972, a group of eight Palestinians scaled the wall of the Olympic village in Munich, about 10 days into the games. They broke into two of the three of the men’s apartments (two women who were competing were housed elsewhere in the village, and the two boating competitors were in the north of the country) and immediately took hostages. A coach and a wrestler who attempted to subdue the attackers were killed — one of them bled to death in the same room his fellow countrymen were held. The gunshots went through the wall near where Alon, an Israeli national fencing champion who had been eliminated prior to the Olympic semifinals, was sleeping, jarring him and his roommate awake.
For some reason, the attackers never entered Alon’s apartment, room number two. For hours, the two fencers and the two marksmen staying across the hall, all of whom were staying on the second floor, and a speed walker who had snuck up a problematically noisy staircase to join his teammates, argued about what they should do.
They were torn, Alon told the crowd.
A clear, simple shot by one of the marksmen would have undoubtedly ended the life of one of their captors, but Alon said he argued that to do so would also have undoubtedly ended the lives of their teammates then and there. So they decided to make a run for it, to the West German police that had surrounded their building.
It took 20 long minutes for the group to tiptoe down the steps. Then, one after the other, leaving 10 seconds between them, they jumped down the balcony and began to run. A gunman shot at the first runner, who made his way to safety by running in a zig-zag pattern. Alon jumped second, and as he hit the ground he said he looked up, right into the face of his captor, then turned around and ran.
He didn’t shoot, Alon said, and the four remaining competitors all ran to safety.
Eventually, the captive Israelis and the Palestinians flew to a remote site, where they worked out a deal that would release the hostages and Black September would have their demands for prisoner releases met. But then things went terribly wrong: When the helicopters arrived with the hostages to release them, West German forces opened fire. The terrorists strafed one of the helicopters with machine gun fire, killing all of the hostages. Another Black September member tossed a grenade into the other helicopter, blowing it up. Five of the Palestinians died in the gunfire, but it brought their cause into the international consciousness.
Alon and his fellow survivors returned to Israel, carrying the bloody belongings of his dead teammates. But after that, for nearly 34 years, he kept silent.
“It’s hard to talk about it. I was a little shy,” Alon told JTNews. “We didn’t do anything, we just escaped.”
People, including his own family, would ask him about it, but he shrugged them off.
“I went to another subject. I didn’t want to talk about it,” he said.
He gave up fencing after the attack. What had been, days earlier, one of the happiest times of his life became the most tragic. He did, however, coach the sport and his son was nationally ranked in Israel. He also briefly returned to competition while in his 40s.
But questions plagued Alon for decades after the attack: In particular, why Black September never entered apartment two and why the terrorist failed to pull the trigger when the five survivors escaped. They were questions that the survivors and their families would discuss when they got together each year to commemorate the attack. But nobody wanted to talk about it publicly.
“All the survivors, they didn’t want to make any waves,” he said.
Then Steven Spielberg made Munich, a film about the attack, and Alon decided he should speak out. He did an event for Chabad at Oxford University. Then he went to Yale. Now he’s working on a book about that chapter of his life, which he hopes will be released next summer.
Alon still feels anger — at the Israeli government for not protecting its citizens by providing security for the athletes as well as a Mossad operation that killed most of the surviving members of Black September — and also at the attackers, not for doing what they did, but for doing it at the Olympics.
“The Olympics were something to me that were really special,” he said. “It was the first time in history that something like this happened at the Olympics…. How can people be not so human, and think about attacking something like this? It got very difficult to understand why they did it. They could fight or attack other places like they used to do, but not the Olympics.”