Where were you when it happened? That's the question we all ask ourselves when some event changes the world forever, history forever. For the baby boomers, it was the assassination of JFK. For my generation, it was 9/11. However, another seminal historical event took place over forty Septembers ago when 11 Israeli athletes were murdered in Munich, Germany during the 1972 Olympics by a Palestinian terror group known as Black September. It was a dark September indeed that year when people like my ten-year-old parents sat glued to their television sets to watch the horrific developments unfurl before their eyes, powerless to save any of the doomed men. One can only imagine when ABC sports journalist Jim McKay delivered those heart-shattering words on live television, "They're all gone."
You may know the story from Steven Spielberg's morally ambiguous 2005 drama film about the event and the Israeli government's secret operation to find and kill those responsible for what had happened. But like a wise Holocaust survivor once said, It's only ever just a movie. You can never truly capture the horror of what transpired and the shockwave it sent throughout the world no matter how much celluloid or how many high paid screenwriters you acquire. My grandfather survived three concentration camps, yet I will never know the suffering he went through and witness. It's always guesswork, but sometimes you can come very close and that's important because if you don't recreate happened, people will forget.
Something my father likes to say when we discuss the massacre is that less than 30 years after WWII, an attack on Jews was made once again in Germany. The bitterest of ironies, I'd say. But no matter how much you think you're done with the past, it can always come back to bite you. That's the entire point of remembering events like the Holocaust, so they'll never happen again.
I think we should remember this dreadful event, not as marker of the unrest in the Middle East or between Israel and Palestine. No, it's something much more simple than that: how capable human beings are of committing heinous acts without a second thought. We need to remember the Munich Massacre 43 years after the fact because we need to be reminded of the infinite cruelty that is possible from a human being. Killing someone in cold blood is fundamentally wrong, even if you have "beef" with them. We need to remember that antisemitism, like racism, is not something that will just go away. There will always be mean-spirited people in the world to cause chaos and disrupt the natural order. But it's up to us, as cliche as it may sound, to fight against that darkness. The world won't be fixed in a day, but hey, you know what they say about Rome.
