When the hostages and terrorists were taken on three helicopters to the airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, a Lufthansa airplane was waiting on the runway to take them to Algeria. But when the first terrorist climbed into the cockpit, he realized that the flight crew was not there. German agents opened fire and turned on the floodlights. Two terrorists were struck and killed. Instead of returning fire or surrendering, the surviving terrorists completed their mission, throwing a hand grenade into the helicopter where the nine hostages sat. With the Jews dead and their objective attained, the three surviving Palestinians surrendered. Thirteen years later, on August 30, 1985, the Palestinian leader Abu Daoud would explain the significance of this action to the Tunisian weekly Realité: “The Zionist state is a military entity, and its citizens must be considered as combatants.” From Munich to Tel Aviv, nothing has changed over the past thirty years.
That day in Munich, Islamic terrorism cut short eleven Jewish stories. Every one of them was a member of the great body of Israel. There was Moshe Weinberg, a Jewish son of Israeli liberty, with a winning smile and the joy of living stamped on his face. Amitzur Shapira, the father of four beautiful children, was a teacher in Herzliya. Shaul Ladani, who escaped the massacre in Munich, had been deported at the age of seven to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where his parents were exterminated. He contracted typhoid fever, but was saved and went to live in Israel. There was the great Yosef Romano, a Jew of Libyan origin who before dedicating himself to sports had fought like a lion in the Six-Day War. He was killed just five months after the birth of his third child. As Yosef’s friends would say, “courage was his religion.” The day before he was killed, Romano had said, “This is my last competition; I don’t have enough time for my children.” Yosef was so different from David Berger, a Jew from Cleveland, from one of the many American Jewish families who “make the aliyah” to Israel to discover their “roots.” He was supposed to get married after returning from the Olympics. His father said that David knew the risks he had taken on by moving to Tel Aviv; he was proud of David, the idealist, the pacifist, who felt the injustice of the world, who wrote poetry about the war in Vietnam.
There was Mark Slavin, who kissed the Jewish soil upon his arrival in Israel. He came from Minsk, and had fought against the Communists who imprisoned and silenced thousands of Russian Jews who, like him, wanted to reach Jerusalem. Mark’s grandmother, Griša, said that “he was a true Jew; he had always felt that he was an Israeli, and he was the one who convinced everyone to leave the Soviet Union.” He was made of the same mettle as the famous “Prisoner of Zion” Ida Nudel, who recalled, “I arrived in the land of my dreams not as a refugee looking for just any sort of place under the sun. I am in the land of my people, I am free among my people.” Mark had the calling of a liberator, and helped give a million Soviet Jews, a tribe absorbed and lost behind the Iron Curtain, the opportunity to find their freedom in the land of their fathers. He studied Hebrew in a kibbutz; he wanted to relive the history of the pioneers, and his parents were welcomed by the devout, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Bnei Brak.
Mark Slavin’s story is the story of many thousands of Russian Jews who fought in the prisons and in the squares against Communist obscurantism that kept them from having an identity and reclaiming the right to emigrate to the land of their fathers. They had nothing but their typewriters, which they used to translate the samizdat, or clandestine manifestos, inciting the people to resistance and rebellion. It was the power of the Exodus. They threatened the Kremlin and the greatest totalitarian empire of the twentieth century not with weapons and bullets, but with slogans like “Let our people go” or “Freedom for Israel.” Those dissidents gave a new meaning to the Jewish Passover expression zman heruteinu, “the time of our freedom.” Their Judaism grew in the Soviet prisons, nourished by a fervent underground movement that was undermining the Soviet colossus from within. The refuseniks, the Jewish dissidents, had the special serenity of those who know they are in the right.
In Munich, there was Ze’ev Friedman, who was born in Siberia, and whose father was deported to a labor camp on the Vistula. He spoke a wonderful mixture of Yiddish and Russian. His mother lost everyone in Treblinka, the extermination camp that in a few months obliterated hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe. The first Jews from Warsaw arrived at Treblinka—that place with the strange and beautiful name, surrounded by conifer forests and little ponds—on the ninth day of the month of Av, the same day on which the Temple was destroyed. The Jews of Treblinka were “trunks endowed with legs,” slaves of a new species of men. The “Jews of death” took care of the corpses of their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters, pulling them out of the gas chambers by the legs, removing their gold teeth, cutting their hair, and throwing them into the open-air incinerators.
Ze’ev Friedman, who grew up with these stories, had distinguished himself in action against the fedayeen in Metula, a city on the Lebanese border. His father appeared on television asking for Ze’ev to be released, and recounting the fate that his family had already met. Upon learning of his son’s death, he said that if Israel did not respond to the massacre, “Hitler will have won from the grave.” Hannah and Shlomo were the only two survivors of the family. Ze’ev would have been the last male. Germany—like all of Europe—was indifferent to the silent martyrdom of Ze’ev Friedman.
Another martyr of Munich was Kehat Schorr, who arrived in Israel from Romania in 1963, where he had fought against the Nazi troops in the Carpathian Mountains. With him was Yakov Springer, who taught school in Bat Yam, near Jaffa. He was one of the few survivors of the armed revolt in the Warsaw ghetto on April 19, 1943.
Yakov was a veteran of Via Mila, the heart of Jewish resistance against Nazism. During the war, the European newspapers noted that in Warsaw, for the first time in two thousand years, the Jews had fought in a battle. “Who knows if the spirit of Israel will not rise again from the ashes of Warsaw,” one Polish newspaper mused. Yakov took part in the revolt of two hundred Jewish young people. For them it was simply a question of how they were going to die. They wanted to show that they were not insects. “We wanted to choose to die our own way,” said Stefan Grayek, a leader of the uprising. He lived the rest of his life in a little house on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. “On the street we saw scenes that the human mind cannot imagine: infants, alive, in the arms of their dead mothers, piles of dead children, and around them other children squatting on the ground, waiting for their turn.” Yakov Springer, a man much like Grayek, would also fight for possession of East Jerusalem, where a little bit of his marvelous Jewish Warsaw had been planted, the Warsaw of rabbis, street kids, intellectuals—a city that by then existed only in the faded memories of the few who had survived its extinction.
It was partly with Springer in mind that Yitzhak Rabin, on April 19, 1993, paid homage in Warsaw to those who had taken up arms against the oppressors: “Where are the writers? And the rabbis? And the doctors? And the musicians? And the children? Where is Janusz Korczak? Doesn’t my people exist anymore? In human history, the rebels of the ghetto will be remembered as those who kept the embers of honor alive. We have risen from the ashes of the martyrs; the courage of the combatants in the ghetto is the cornerstone of Israel’s foundation.”
The community of Bat Yam paused to weep for its noble fellow citizen, and Yakov Springer’s daughter came back from Sinai, where she was serving in the army.
There was also Andrei Spitzer, who lived with his wife, a convert to Judaism, in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Andrei had immigrated from Communist Romania in 1967, the year in which the tiny Jewish state was attacked by the Arab powers. His wife received death threats from Black September after Andrei’s murder, and agents from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, flew to Holland to bring her to safety in Israel. Another of the victims in Munich was Eliezer Halfin, the son of Lithuanian Jews who had lost all their relatives in the Holocaust. The Nazis had killed twenty of Eliezer’s relatives. The USSR had denied him an expatriate visa dozens of times and even prohibited him from participating in international competitions, out of fear that Eliezer “the Zionist” would make statements in favor of Israel. He was the last Halfin male. The last victim of Black September was Yosef Gutfreund,