Address by Jeanne Futeran, President of the Maccabi World Union
Remembering Munich
Families of Munich athletes, Ambassador Kindermann, Ephraim Zinger, Stuart Lustigman, Gideon Osterer and Maccabim from Germany, chaverim!
After 9/11 in New York in 2001, more people seemed to understand what really happened at Munich in 1972, and why. Today, many more people know what happened at Munich, but most have no true understanding of why it happened.
Since the last time I was here, during the 17th Maccabiah in 2005, they made a movie called 'Munich'. it is not really about the crime against humanity at the Olympic village in 1972. It is dramatic fiction about why the crime happened and about what happened and why, after the crime.
Movies about real events can be a very good thing, because more people know that something happened. But fiction movies can also do bad things, and spread wrong impressions of the truth. the falseness of fiction becomes belief, and belief becomes truth.
The true reality of Munich is terribly hard to imagine. Perhaps we do not want to imagine the horrible reality that befell Jewish athletes in Munich. from the outside, we know what happened, but we can never know what happened inside -- inside the hearts and minds and souls of our athletes we feel we need to know, but that is what we cannot -- or do not want -- to imagine.
As to the hearts and minds and souls of the killers -- we have no need to know what happened inside them. They came in evil. they came to murder. they came to kill, and even to be killed themselves. they, and the people who sent them, deserved to die at Munich, and after Munich. they, and the people who sent them, made themselves pure evil. They deliberately forfeited their own humanity. They do not deserve the grace of remembrance. Only the horror of their action must be remembered.
Those who came to Munich in the innocence of peace all deserved to live -- the 11 who died and the 5 who survived, and the policeman who was murdered -- they all deserved to live. They deserve the grace of our remembrance.
We must cherish their memory in our hearts.
As long as we remember them, evil wins no victory.
It is our duty, and that is the truth, those are the only true lessons of Munich.
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