Decades later, the 86-year-old returns to Germany to visit the two places where he narrowly escaped death. On Saturday, Ladany, who was born in 1936 in Belgrade, the former Yugoslavia, brought family members to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany to show them the place where he was imprisoned by the Nazis as an 8-year-old. boy. The octogenarian will then take part in a joint German-Israeli ceremony in Munich on Monday to mark the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Olympians by Palestinian terrorists. Ladany, who competed in the Munich Games as a runner, walked briskly in green sneakers and a beige hat as he led his granddaughter, his younger sister and her three children to Bergen-Belsen, which has been turned into a memorial . He pointed to a plot of land, now covered in blackberry and heather bushes and tall birches and pines, where No. 10 Barracks used to stand. He was held there with his parents and two sisters for about six months in 1944 before they were allowed to leave under a deal negotiated by Hungarian and Swiss Jewish foundations, which paid a ransom to the Nazis to free more than 1,600 Jews deported from Hungary. Israeli Olympic jockey Shaul Ladany, second right, talks with his sister Martha Flatto-Zemanek, right, granddaughter Raz Sharifi, second left, and nephew Assaf Flatto in front of a miniature of the former Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen inside the former camp in Bergen, Germany on Saturday. (Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press) “It’s not pleasant to remember the period here,” Ladany told The Associated Press in an interview at the former concentration camp. But it was important for him to return and tell relatives about the horrors he suffered during the Holocaust, in which 6 million European Jews were killed. It is a pilgrimage he has already made several times in the past with other family members. “I always bring one of my relatives here to teach them, educate them about what happened,” Ladani said. Even though he was a small boy at the time, Ladany still remembers the constant hunger and the seemingly endless roll call in the cold air outside the barracks as the guards counted the camp’s inmates. The Landanis fled Belgrade in 1941 after their home was bombed by the German Luftwaffe, or air force. They escaped to Budapest, Hungary, but were eventually captured by the Nazis and sent to Bergen-Belsen, where 52,000 mostly Jewish prisoners died in the concentration camp and more than 19,000 prisoners of war, mostly from the Soviet Union, died in the adjacent POW camp.
Racewalker still holds the world record
After being released in the exchange, Ladany and his family traveled to Switzerland and eventually moved in 1948 to Israel. There he grew up to become a professor of industrial engineering and management and an accomplished race walker – he still holds the world record for 50 miles, set in 1972. When he came to Munich for the Olympics at the age of 36, he said, he tried to guess the age of every German he met and “if in my opinion they were in the age group that could participate in the atrocities of the Third Reich, I prevented any contact”. However, this time it was not the Germans who threatened his life. In the early morning of September 5, members of the Palestinian group Black September stormed the Olympic Village, killed two athletes from the Israeli delegation and took nine others hostage, demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel as well as two left-wing extremists in West German prisons. A plaque commemorating the 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer killed in a terrorist attack during the 1972 Olympics is located at the former Israeli team accommodation in the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany. (File/The Associated Press) Ladany, again, narrowly escaped. A horrified roommate woke him up to say a fellow athlete was dead, and he quickly put on his sneakers and ran to their apartment door. Just outside he saw an Olympic official plead with a man in a tracksuit and hat, later identified as the ringleader of the attackers, to be “human” and leave the Red Cross officials in a neighboring apartment. The man, Ladany recalled, replied, “Jews aren’t even human.” Ladany turned around, threw some clothes over his pajamas and joined his other fleeing teammates. Not everyone was so lucky. All nine hostages and one policeman were killed during a failed rescue attempt by German forces. Ladani said that while before the attack the Olympics were purely “a sporting meeting of joy and competition”, today no such event is held without tight security. “Since then,” he said, “the world has changed.” West Germany was criticized not only for the failure of the rescue, but also for hiding historical files about the tragic events for decades and for not offering enough compensation to the families of the victims. Relatives of the 11 slain athletes had threatened to boycott Monday’s anniversary, but last week they finally reached an agreement in which they will receive a total of 28 million euros in compensation. Ladany plans to wear his original Israeli team jacket from 1972 when he attends the memorial service and is looking forward to showing the world that both he and Israel have endured. “Those who tried to kill me are no longer alive,” he said. “We’re still here. Not just as individuals, but as a country.”
