It took Munich massacre survivor Dan Alon 33 years to speak publicly about the murder of fellow Israeli athletes, he tells Rosita Boland
It's one of the iconic photographs of the 20th century. The image of a Black September terrorist in a balaclava, leaning out over the balcony of the apartment complex at the 1972 Munich Olympics where the Israeli delegation was staying. Two of the delegation had already been murdered. Two days later, 17 people in total were dead: 11 Israelis, five Palestinian hostage-takers and one German policeman.
While the photograph is internationally famous and familiar to many, only a handful of people are alive who saw what the photograph does not record - the view from behind the balcony. Dan Alon is one of them.
Alon, who lives in Tel Aviv, was one of the 15-strong Israeli delegation of athletes at the 1972 Games. "I was the Israeli fencing champion at the time," he explains. Alon is in Dublin for just one day: he has been invited here by Rabbi Zalman Lent to speak to members of the Jewish community about his experiences of that dreadful September.
The Munich Massacre, as it became known, happened 34 years ago, but it is only in the last few months that Alon has spoken of his experience as a survivor, either publicly or privately. Three years ago, his son, who was at the University of Oxford, told his rabbi who his father was. When Steven Spielberg's film about the events, Munich, came out last year, the rabbi remembered the conversation with Alon's son.
"He called me, and he asked me to come and talk to the students at Oxford. He was very, very persistent." For a long time, Alon ignored the calls, but he was eventually convinced to go to England at the beginning of the year.
"It was very hard, the talk," he says. "I had to stop a few times. I couldn't speak. Not because of the English - but because it was really stuck in my throat; the words were stuck. I had to apologise for stopping all the time." He got a great reception from the audience.
"After the talk, a psychologist from the university who had been in the audience approached me and she told me that as a therapy, she suggested that I talk about it more often." He thought she was right.
Since then, Alon has been travelling around the world, speaking of his experiences at the invitation of various universities and Jewish communities. "Now I can talk about it," he says with confidence.
One of the most poignant stories about the hostage-taking was that of the fate of Alon's fencing coach, Andre Spitzer.
"He had got special permission from the head of delegation to go to Holland to visit his family for one night, the 3rd of September. He was supposed to be back for the next night, the 4th of September. On that day, his wife drove him to the train station to catch the train to Munich and they came too late to the station and the train had left.
"His wife tried to tell him to go the next morning because there wasn't another train. But he said, 'No, I promised the head of delegation and Danny that I would be back in the evening. So he insisted his wife drive him to the next station to catch the train. They drove, and they came to the station, and they missed the train again. So they drove on the next station, Eindhoven, 30 miles away - and he just caught it that time."
Spitzer was machine-gunned to death in the botched rescue attempt at Furstenfeldbruck airport, two days later.
The first Alon himself knew of what was to unfold was when he woke up at 4.30am on September 3rd, 1972 in apartment 2 to "a big noise of explosions and shouting. Then it was quiet and we went back to sleep. Twenty minutes later we heard machine guns firing and the whole wall of the room was shaking."
They did not know it at the time, but their apartment, which housed five of their delegation, was the only one the gunmen did not enter.
All other Israeli athletes and coaches in the apartment complex were rounded up and brought into the next-door apartment. From the balcony of Alon's room, he looked down and saw the Black September terrorist, in a balaclava and holding a machine gun, guarding the back entrance to the next-door apartment. By then, Moshe Weinberg, the wrestling coach, and Yossef Romano, a weightlifter, were dead.
They themselves had guns in the apartment, belonging to the shooting team, which they considered using on the guerilla on the balcony. But they didn't know how many guerillas there were, or what the consequences would be for their captured team-mates, so they did not shoot. Instead, they crept down the creaking wooden stairs of the duplex - "the guy outside was standing very close to the door" - jumped over the balcony and ran for it. Amazingly, they were not shot while escaping. To this day, Alon does not know why the sniper on the balcony, who saw them running, did not shoot, nor why their apartment was the only one left alone.
Two days later, after the 17 deaths, Alon and his surviving team-mates had the traumatic task of returning to the apartment complex to pack up the belongings of everyone who had been murdered.
"It was a very sad moment. There were a lot of toys and dolls the athletes had bought to bring home for their small babies. We had to pack up each suitcase and bring them back to the families. The next day, we flew to Israel with the coffins, and the next day we had the funerals."
Alon is still angry. He's angry with the people who committed the crime, and also that the Israeli team were sent to the Olympics with no security.
"That makes me mad. They were so naive. Why did we have to be like ducks?"
He hopes the fact that he is now speaking out about his experiences will help put pressure on the Olympic movement to observe a minute's silence at each future games in memory of the murdered athletes.
"This is something their families have been trying unsuccessfully for years to do. It has never happened yet. The opening and closing ceremonies go on for hours - what is one minute's silence for athletes who died at an Olympic Games? They have become part of Olympic history. We are hoping this might happen in Beijing."
At the end of the interview, Alon asks if I will send a copy of the article to him. I write down his address and then pass him the notebook to make sure it is spelt correctly. For the first time in the interview, he smiles, wryly. "You don't need the full address," he says. "If you just put 'Dan Alon, Israel' it would reach me."
Alon knows that the events of that day in September 34 years ago means that his name is now part of Israel's history.