“Munich after the bloodbath”, on Histoire TV: the battle of a lifetime

TV HISTORY – SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 AT 8:50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

The celebration promised to be grandiose on the finish of the summer season of 1972. For the primary time in historical past, the Olympic Video games, on this case these of Munich, in Germany, had been broadcast stay from August 26 by the channels tv worldwide.

Ankie Spitzer, the younger Dutch spouse of Andre Spitzer, coach of Israeli fencers, accompanied her husband to Bavaria, accompanied by their granddaughter. “The Olympic Village was actually an excellent place, she remembers. The athletes met, mentioned, danced. In the future, Andre acknowledged the Lebanese fencers and needed to speak to them. I advised him he had misplaced his thoughts as a result of on the time Israel was at conflict with Lebanon. They laughed collectively, as if the conflict didn’t exist…”

On 5 September, at daybreak, eight Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September group broke into the Olympic Village. In a couple of hours, the operation will value the lives of 11 Israelis, together with Andre, Ankie’s husband. 5 of the terrorists can be killed.

it’s being rebuilt

This drama, skilled stay and in actual time by the entire world, may have profoundly upset the lives of the 4 girls whose portraits this considerably too lengthy documentary, missing perspective however generally transferring, paints.

If the paths of Marianne Gladnikoff and Sylvia Rafael, two Mossad brokers, and of the sprinter Esther Roth-Shachamorov who misplaced her coach in the course of the Munich bloodbath, lack depth, the portrait of Ankie Spitzer, who spent her life to battle in order that the victims of Munich are usually not forgotten, is price seeing.

The best way to stay after such a tragedy? The best way to honor the reminiscence of the victims, to rebuild? “After Munich, my mother and father needed me to return again to the Netherlands. But it surely was in Israel that I needed to stay. If I had lived in a pleasant little home in Amsterdam, I’d by no means have been in a position to clarify to my daughter who her father was and the way it occurred,” explains the one who grew to become a journalist in control of the Center East for Dutch and Belgian media.

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Relentlessly, this lady will battle for the Worldwide Olympic Committee to remind the world of the reminiscence of the eleven victims of September 1972. On the Atlanta Video games in 1996, she takes the fourteen kids who misplaced their father to Munich. But it surely was not till 2016, on the Rio Video games, that the IOC lastly organized a tribute ceremony for the victims.

“I nonetheless have one factor to do.launches Ankie who underlines the incompetence of the safety forces in the course of the tragedy. I would like an unbiased investigation committee to be created to make clear what occurred. This story is not only about eight Palestinians killing eleven Israelis. » The battle of a lifetime.

Munich after the bloodbath by Francine Zuckerman (Ger./Can./Isr., 2019, 70 min).

Alain Fixed