Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response by Aaron J. Klein Read Free Book Online

lost his entire family on German soil, heard the sounds of Gutfreund’s desperate struggle. He bolted out of bed and into the living room, where he saw Gutfreund grappling with the half-open door. On the other side he clearly saw a man in a black ski mask prying the door open with his weapon. “I understood that I needed to escape immediately,” Skolsky, the only survivor from Apartment 1, said in his testimony. He yelled to his sleeping flatmates to run for their lives as he raced to the back window.
    Everything happened quickly. Only ten seconds had passed from the moment Gutfreund blocked the door until Skolsky reached the window. The lock stuck. Skolsky knew his life was in immediate danger. Flustered and panicked, he punched through the thick double glass, cutting himself on the remaining shards as he threw himself out the window. He jumped to his feet and ran. By now the terrorists had overpowered Gutfreund. They charged into the room and began shooting at Skolsky through the broken window. “I could hear the bullets whistling past my ears,” he reported. He ran through the courtyard garden, barefoot, in his pajamas. He slipped behind the corner of the building and crouched down, stunned.
             
    The gunfire that almost killed Skolsky was the same gunfire that roused Lalkin.
    Back in Apartment 1, the terrorists herded the six hostages into a second-floor bedroom and began binding them with the precut rope they had brought with them. They marched Gutfreund to the corner of Apartment 1, keeping a weapon trained on his face. They yanked the other five from their beds: Amitzur Shapira, a forty-year-old track and field coach and father of four; Kehat Shorr, fifty-three, the marksmen’s coach; Andrei Spitzer, twenty-seven, the newly married fencing coach and father of a one-month-old daughter; Yaakov Springer, fifty, a weight lifting referee officiating at his fifth Olympic Games; and Moshe “Moni” Weinberg, thirty-three, the wrestling coach and father of a newborn son. Unlike the rest of them, Weinberg was not drowsy. He had just sneaked back into the apartment after a night out with friends in Munich. A strong man, used to close-quarter battle, Weinberg lunged at Issa, knocking him off his feet. But before he could grab his weapon, a second terrorist, acting instinctively, shot a single round that ripped through his right cheek. Blood poured from his mouth, staining his clothes and the floor beneath his feet. The terrorists pushed the hostages into Shorr and Spitzer’s room on the second floor. They were all bound at the wrists and ankles.
    The men sat stunned on the two simple beds, most of them in their underwear. Issa and two of the masked men remained with the hostages, guns pointed at their heads. Tony, the second in command, and the four other terrorists took Weinberg with them and set out to find more Israelis. Outside they passed by Apartment 2, housing five Israeli track and field athletes, and charged into Apartment 3. Weinberg, bleeding, was forced to lead the terrorists through the apartment complex to the Israeli rooms, an AK -47 at his back. Despite everything, he kept his head clear. Apartment 3 housed the wrestlers and the weight lifters. Weinberg, their coach, must have reasoned that the big boys had the best chance of overpowering the terrorists.
    Tony and his men surprised the athletes who shared the two floors of Apartment 3: David Berger, twenty-eight, American-born weight lifter; Eliezer Halfin, twenty-four, lightweight, Soviet-born wrestler; Mark Slavin, eighteen, Greco-Roman wrestler, also from the former Soviet Union and the youngest member of the Israeli delegation; Yossef Romano, thirty-two, middleweight, Libyan-born weight lifter, and father of three girls; Ze’ev Friedman, twenty-eight, a featherweight, Polish-born weight lifter; and Gad Tsabari, a light flyweight freestyle wrestler. The terrorists quickly pulled the athletes out of bed. Shouting and butting them with