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Munich attack survivor speaks of ordeal after 34 years

"At the beginning I was thinking, `Let's kill them,' but I've lived in Israel for the last 30 years, and they're killing you and you're killing them. You have to find other solutions."

Dan Alon, an Israeli athlete at the 1972 Munich Olympics

An Israeli athlete who survived the attacks at the Munich Olympics in 1972 spoke about his ordeal for the first time in the US on Thursday night at Yale, warning that reprisal killings of terrorists only lead to "bloodshed and more bloodshed."

Dan Alon, once a champion Israeli fencer, said he was inspired by watching the movie "Munich" to tell the story of his escape from the building where a Palestinian terrorist group had taken his fellow athletes and some coaches hostage, later killing 11 of them. He said he had kept silent in the nearly 34 years since the attack, not even telling his wife and daughter, who sat in the back of the room as he spoke.

"It was emotional," he said, explaining why he kept silent for so long. "It was hard for me to talk."

Alon, now 60, recalled the harrowing details of his escape, including the decision by members of the shooting team not to use the guns they had brought for competition to attack the terrorists, and the sound of the creaky steps the athletes had to walk down to escape from the building.

The Munich Games, he said, had begun on a high note. The opening ceremony was "the most beautiful day of my life," he said, particularly because it was the first Olympic Games in Germany since the Holocaust.

Around 4:30am on Sept. 5, 1972, Alon said he awoke to loud noises, but he figured that another team was celebrating and he fell back asleep. Soon afterward, however, gunshots shook the walls of his room. Looking out the window, he saw a wrestling coach, Moshe Weinberg, lying on the ground outside and heard one of the terrorists speaking to German police about how they had taken hostages and wanted hundreds of Palestinian prisoners released.

The terrorists, Alon said, had attacked the Israelis in apartments on either side of him, but for some unknown reason they had passed his door. He said he thinks Weinberg protected him by leading the terrorists away from his apartment.

Alon was with members of the shooting team, who had guns. After a short discussion, however, the athletes decided not to shoot their attackers because they did not know how many had entered the complex or whether they would retaliate by killing the hostages.

They crept slowly down the stairs of their apartment -- "walking on eggs" -- so as not to alert the attackers, he said.

Eventually, they got out of the building by jumping over a balcony railing and running through a garden to the German police, who shuttled them to safety. Alon said he started to cry when he saw his fellow Israelis ride by as hostages in a bus on their way to the airport where they would all die. At the airport, the terrorists got into a gunfight with German officers and, during the battle, the remaining Israelis were killed.

As for the reprisal killings taken out by Mossad officers against people suspected of involvement in the Munich attacks, Alon said they were a mistake.

"At the beginning I was thinking, `Let's kill them,'" he said. "But I've lived in Israel for the last 30 years, and they're killing you and you're killing them. You have to find other solutions."
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