Dan Alon, one of the five Israeli athletes to escape during the Munich Olympics massacre, spoke of his experiences Friday and Saturday at the Syracuse University Chabad House. For 34 years following the attacks, Alon never spoke publicly of his experiences, but felt he should take advantage of the opportunity following the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Munich.

“It was very hard for me to talk,” Alon said. “I had to stop many times. My words were stuck in my throat.”

He emphasized he is not a speaker from the beginning and said he would be telling his story, but not giving a speech. At times, the soft-spoken Alon stopped, seemingly choked up by the emotion of the subject. He said there were more things he wanted to discuss, but he simply could not go into detail.

Ben Barnhart, a freshman computer art major, said Alon was able to convey his emotions effectively in the speech.

“I’ve never heard a personal story like that before,” Barnhart said.

The details of Alon’s escape involve the failure of the Palestinian hostage takers to enter the second of five apartments housing the Israeli athletes. Awakened by gunfire in the first apartment, Alon says he didn’t know what was happening when the attack began.

The first shots woke Alon up, but he did not know exactly what was going on. The terrorists moved down the hall, skipping room number two. They would pass his entrance twice that night, but they never came in.

“Why they didn’t come into number two in the beginning, nobody knows,” he said.

Alon and the other athlete raced to the balcony, where they saw a terrorist outside. He was wearing a white hat and was holding a machine gun in one hand and a hand grenade in the other. The terrorist yelled to the German police that they had killed two Israelis and were holding hostages and wanted to make demands to the Israeli government.

“That’s when we knew we were in for some problems,” Alon said.

Alon’s first thought was to fight back. He was a fencing athlete but he was staying with others who were in the shooting competition. They could try to kill the terrorists before they themselves were killed.

“After a few minutes or more calculating the situation, we decided to escape because we didn’t know how many terrorists there were,” he said. “It was too risky for us, and it was too risky for the hostages.”