How the Munich Massacre Altered My Course in Life

 Some anniversaries mostly provoke incredulity: to think that a year from now we will be taking note of the sixtieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination seems just amazing to me. Like everybody alive then over the age of four or five, I remember just where I was when I heard about Dallas: in Mrs. D’Antona’s fifth-grade classroom in P.S. 196 on 113^th Street in Forest Hills. Nor do I find it even remotely possible to believe that that more than half a century has passed since that summery evening I was lying on my back on a blanket behind one of the dormitories at the University of Vermont in Burlington on July 20, 1969, while listening to Neil Armstrong say what he said as he took his first steps on the moon. Or that 9/11 is now more than two decades in the past.

But other anniversaries, I take more personally—not necessarily because I myself had something to do with the event under consideration, but because of the effect that event had on me, on my life. And foremost in that category is the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre of the Israeli athletes in Munich in September of 1972.

I was on the far cusp of my life-long involvement with Jewish life in 1972. A mere lad of nineteen back then, I had spent more than a few summers working in Jewish summer camps and was loosely affiliated with the Forest Hills Jewish Center. (By “loosely affiliated,” I mean I went to shul there on Shabbat from time to time but without actually having gone so far as to join the congregation.) So I was still very much a work in progress in those days, at least Jewishly speaking, and had yet to formulate even a vague plan about the path I wished to take forward into the rest of my life.

I was beginning my junior year of college. I would have liked to spend that year studying in Israel—I remember sharing that thought with a few friends, but specifically not with my parents—but I didn’t qualify for the only program CUNY was offering in Israel because I hadn’t completed two years of Hebrew language instruction. (To be more specific, I hadn’t completed any.) The rule seemed foolish and counterproductive to me—the whole point of me going to Israel would have been to devote the year to working on my Hebrew—and I remember personally trying to get the sub-dean (or whoever he was) in charge of study abroad options to make an exception for me. I was unsuccessful—I don’t remember him being even remotely moved by my argument that it was crazy to deny me a chance to study Hebrew because I hadn’t studied enough Hebrew—and so had to choose between spending my junior year in France and spending it in Germany. (I had two years of both college French and college German under my belt, so was qualified for either program.) I opted for France, mostly because my parents would have had triple heart attacks if I had even suggested visiting Germany, let alone spending a year there. I understood how they felt. It was, after all, basically how everybody in my world felt back then, and certainly not just the survivor-families in our neighborhood. And I felt that way myself as well, although not entirely: I was very curious back then to see what Germany was like but unable to imagine settling in and actually living there. So it was France.

I spent a few days in Paris, then a week in Reims in some sort of preparatory course, then headed to Nancy, the city in eastern France in which the CUNY study-abroad program was located. My whole situation was strange from the get-go. I, who grew up in a neighborhood as close to 100% Jewish as they came, was suddenly living in a men’s dormitory inhabited mostly by visitors from French-speaking West Africa and Southeast Asia, most of whom were much older than I was. (There were other Queens College students in the program, but no other men. So I was on my own in the men’s dorm.) They were friendly, even very friendly, but I was clearly not in Kansas anymore: none of my three eventual best friends (one from Chad, one from Niger, and one from Laos) had ever even met a Jewish person before, let alone befriended one. And no one—literally no one at all—spoke English. (Eventually, some English guys from Leeds moved in too. But that was more than halfway through the year.) So it was clear from the start that that my life in Nancy was going to unfold in French or not at all. Eager not to have no one at all to talk to (and having no alternate plan anyway), I got to work on improving my conversational French quickly.

And so there I was on the morning of September 6, 1972, having a bowl of café crème (in the provincial French style) in the restaurant universitaire adjacent to the dormitory when I heard the news. My French was still very weak—two years of college French do not a fluent speaker or understander make—but I was able to glean enough from the chatter all around that there had been a terrible massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich and that none of the hostages had survived. Hearing this in a language I barely spoke, not being able at understand everything people were saying, lacking even the vocabulary to ask for more details, the one thing that was crystal clear to me was that I was the only person present who was taking this at all personally. For them—nice fellows from West Africa and Southeast Asia—this was another news item, something interesting, even shocking, that had happened, that made for interesting breakfast discussion. But no one was that engaged by the story. A radio had been playing, but the newscaster soon went on to other news, eventually to the sports and then to the weather. Breakfast ended. Everybody left and I left too. But something had happened to me in that coffee lounge, something stirring and decisive. I felt this odd mixture of alone and not-alone, of being the only Jew in the world and someone tied viscerally and profoundly to the Jewish people, of being outraged by the horror of the Munich massacre and deeply engaged by the thought that the Jewish people are as alone in the world as I personally was in that student dining hall on the Boulevard de la Libération in Nancy. It was, to say the least, a strange moment.

The next few days altered my life. I found my way downtown. I located a store on the Rue St. Dizier that sold international newspapers. I bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune and some French newspapers I could peruse at my leisure with a dictionary in my dorm room, plus—amazingly—a copy of Omer, an Israel newspapers printed specifically with lots of vowel signs and easy vocabulary for new immigrants. Why the Halle de la Presse carried such a thing or for whom, I have no idea. But they did carry it and I bought a copy, then headed back to my dorm room to try to decipher it. I only partially succeeded.

But the die was cast. Or at least for me it was. The next day, I dropped all the courses in French and German that I had been pre-registered for by my masters at CUNY, and registered instead for every Hebrew course offered by the university in Nancy. And that Friday night I found my way to the synagogue of Nancy on the Boulevard Joffre and—with some combination of trepidation and excitement—stepped inside. (The synagogue in Nancy, built in 1788, is the second oldest still-functioning synagogue in France. So it wasn’t even remotely like stepping into an American synagogue—even the smell of the place, not unpleasant but wholly unfamiliar—suggested its age to me.)

The synagogue was like nothing I had previously experienced. Men sat downstairs, women up in the balcony. The entire service was mumbled in Hebrew. The one or two hymns sung aloud were sung to melodies I hadn’t ever heard and didn’t know. No page numbers were announced. You either knew where we were or you didn’t. But I somehow didn’t feel as alone or at sea as you’d think I should have. And after the service, people—and lots of them—came up to me and introduced themselves, told me to feel welcome, did what they could to make me feel comfortable. One young man my age invited me to Shabbat dinner with his family a few blocks away. I went. (I had no other place to go and had at any rate missed dinner at the restaurant universitaire.) I came back the following morning and was given an aliyah. I could almost feel the ground shifting under my feet as my life plans subtly altered.

Eventually, I learned the whole horrific story of the massacre in Munich, about the ham-fisted German attempt to rescue the hostages that led to their deaths, about the in-retrospect-insufferably-arrogant refusal of the German authorities to let the Israeli security team take over. I learned the names of the victims too, taking each death as a personal loss. (I even cut a photograph of the twelve victims out of one of the French papers and taped it to the bulletin board over my desk, where it stayed for the whole year I lived in that room.) I became a regular at the synagogue. I took each of my classes enormously seriously. I stayed friends with my dorm-buddies, but acquired a parallel set of friends in the Jewish community. And when I returned to New York a year later, the path I wished to follow in life had opened up before me.