MUNICH REMEMBERED

 In my peripheral role in the UIA here, I turn up to social events. I am inherently anti-social and as I have explained elsewhere in this blog, I have great difficulty with peoples’ faces and names which explains why so many social engagements are just torture for me. (Or else I’m just making excuses.)

Anyway, there is this rather oddly named thing called a ‘Pinning Ceremony’ which involves awarding a gold pin to women who have donated a fair bit to the UIA, and it takes place annually in a private home of a donor, usually a woman who has previously been ‘pinned’, and there is a gathering of about 30 people, including the UIA volunteers, and there is a video shown about the good works of the Women’s Division of the UIA, then there is a speaker, several ladies get their awards, photos are taken,  and a light lunch follows. A nice way to spend 2 hours on a weekday morning, if you don’t have to work.

Last year, they forgot to invite me, a bit embarrassing all round, considering that my husband is the state President, making me the First Lady, hey? Or as I call it, the First Yenta. But this year I got a printed invitation AND a phone call, so how could I not go. And the speaker was supposed to be Greg Sheridan, a journalist whom I admire.

Except it turned out that Greg had to cancel, so the replacement was a speaker who had actually been brought out for Magen David Adom, and graciously agreed to help out when he was finished with the MDA duties.

The speaker was Dan Alon.

I didn’t recognize the name. But after he started speaking and mentioned that he had been a fencer, it struck me like a hammer blow: this man was one of the few who had survived the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

He is a compact, grey-haired, quietly spoken man, and his story is devastatingly powerful. You think that you know about the events on that terrible day, but until you have heard first-person testimony, the horror and the outrage is only theoretical.

Dan couldn’t talk about it for 36 years, until the release of the Spielberg movie, Munich. People called him and asked him questions, and asked him to speak about his experience. It was very hard for him at first, and it was at the second talk he gave, in London, I think, that his wife and children came and heard the story themselves for the first time. He is still traumatized and it is still clearly difficult for him to speak about it, and he describes having difficulty with paranoia and traveling alone among other things.

He has written a book, Munich Memoirs, which I plan to buy, and he talked about the actual day of the attack and his escape along with 4 other athletes.

I won’t tell his story here, because I cannot possibly do it justice. But I will repeat his last story, the last page of his book, where he was invited a few years ago to speak in Berlin. He had been asked to come out by the Chabad rabbi there, whom he knew. At the airport he was met by a tall black man, dressed like a Chabad chassid, and his paranoia kicked in; maybe this was a Hezbollah operative come to kidnap him? But rationality prevailed and he phoned the Chabad Rabbi who reassured him that this man was the real deal, and would be his driver. (Turns out that he was an American ex-basketball player who converted to Judaism and then became a Chabadnik. I’m sure that’s a great story in itself.)

After the speaking engagement was over, the driver was taking him back to the airport when Dan asked him to go past the Brandenburg Gate, which had been a symbol of Nazi power during the Third Reich. Once there, he asked to stop the car, and he got out and danced with the Chabadnik, and he says that he felt as if 6 million Jews and 11 Israeli athletes were dancing with them.

Sometimes a brunch with the ladies can become something else.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that, in the darkest times, at the worst moments, there is hope.

Am Yisrael Chai.