There is an iconic one photo, which makes visible the horror of the murderous attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich 50 years ago and the suffering of the families of all twelve victims. The photo shows a young woman with long hair and glasses, a horizontally striped T-shirt and white flared trousers, who stands in horror in a devastated and filthy room with bullet holes in the walls. It is apartment number 3 in the house at 31 Connollystrasse in the Olympic Village, where Palestinian terrorists kept their bound hostages crammed together on two opposite beds for a day. On the floor in between, they bled to death weightlifter Yossef Romano, badly wounded in the attack; his helpless teammates had to watch him die for hours. The young woman who is photographed a day later in this place of horror is Ankie Spitzer.
It is the moment when the 76-year-old native of the Netherlands begins to fight. As is well known, the attack ended in a massacre at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base, in which her husband, the fencing trainer Andrei Spitzer, also died. They met in 1968 when the Romanian-born son of Jewish forced laborers in the Third Reich was completing further training at a Dutch sports academy. When he and Ankie got married in The Hague on April 17, 1971, fencers stood guard. The couple moves to Israel, their daughter Anouk is born just before the Munich games. During the games, the grandparents in the Netherlands take care of the baby. In Munich, Ankie and Andrei Spitzer rent a boarding house because spouses are not allowed to sleep in the Olympic Village. The young couple loves the casual, international festival atmosphere that Olympia has unfolded in Munich.
Olympia was Andrei Spitzer’s dream
When Anouk falls ill, the young parents travel to the Netherlands. Because everything turns out to be not so bad, Ankie Spitzer urges her husband to return to Munich immediately. After all, Olympia is his lifelong dream, she says. She herself stays with her parents and Anouk. In the middle of the night of September 5, Andrei Spitzer arrives at Munich Central Station, where at the same time the Palestinian terrorists are gathering in a bar just a few meters away for their attack. Andrei Spitzer spends the night in the Olympic Village for the first time ever; in apartment number 3, where 48 hours later his horrified widow will be standing.
At the time, she immediately went to Munich to look for answers, says Spitzer. The fact that she is currently threatening to stay away with the other members of the memorial service 50 years after the Olympic attack is a result of the fact that she has not received any answers to this day. German official files on the assassination are still blocked. She and the other survivors are still waiting for an official apology for the blatant failure of the German security forces. She does not consider the ten million euros offered by the Federal Republic as compensation to be appropriate. “Tip,” scolds Spitzer.
She may be more uncompromising about all of this than other survivors of the 1972 victims, for whom Ankie Spitzer has long been credited as their unofficial spokesperson. After 1972 she worked as a journalist in Israel, raised her daughter Anouk and married a second time years later. Again and again she travels to Germany and asks uncomfortable questions. Instead of receiving clear answers, she is put off and lied to. There are no more files, they tell her. Then a whistleblower in a Munich archive secretly copies 80 pages and sends them to her. A high-ranking Munich police officer went so far as to say that the Israelis themselves were to blame for the assassination because they were always so unfriendly to the Palestinians. It is experiences like this that shape Ankie Spitzer’s image of Germany to this day.