At about 5:30 a.m. on Sept. 5, 1972, Dan Alon awoke to the sound of machine guns and a bullet ripping through the wall of his apartment, just behind his bed.
The Israeli fencer - who survived the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre - addressed around 250 people on Friday in the Terrace Room of Logan Hall, giving a personal account of what he called one of the "worst acts of terror in history."
During the massacre, Palestinian militants took hostages from two of three Israeli apartments, and eventually killed 11 athletes. Alon was in the apartment that was not attacked.
He said, however, that he was able to see the attackers when he looked down through a window at the entrance to his apartment and spotted a man in a white hat, armed with a machine gun and a hand grenade, talking to a policeman.
After overhearing that conversation, Alon said he gathered that Palestinians from the group Black September had taken Israeli athletes from two of the apartments, and that two of his friends had been killed.
Figuring that they would be attacked next, Alon said that he and the other members of his apartment jumped over the balcony and sprinted away. He said they miraculously succeeded, even though the Black September militants opened fire on them.
"When my friends and I returned the next day to the Israeli residence to pack our friends' belongings, there was blood everywhere," Alon said. "The saddest thing was collecting the toys that our friends had bought for their children."
He said, however, that the group did not let the deaths affect the sense of camaraderie of the team.
"Then we went home with 11 coffins," he said. "We arrived as a delegation, and we returned as a delegation. Always a delegation."
Alon quit fencing competitively after that because he was disappointed in the ideal that the Olympics stood for. "It represented friendship, peace, and unity between nations. It didn't matter that we were from Israel, athletes from other nations were friendly to us," he said.
Alon also said that he was happy that Steven Spielberg had made these events into the movie Munich because he does not want people to forget what happened that day. In that vein, he noted that he knew many young people who had never heard of the massacre.
"We need to understand that this act of terror during the Olympics was not part of a war between Israel and terror, it is actually part of a war between the world and terror," he said at the end of his speech.
Spielberg's movie, released last year, follows five Israeli agents who are hired to track and kill those responsible for the Munich massacre.
