Andre Spitzer (; 4 July 1945 – 6 September 1972) was an Israeli fencing master and coach of Israel's 1972 Summer Olympics team. He was one of 11 athletes and coaches taken hostage and subsequently killed by terrorists in the Munich massacre.
Early life
Spitzer was born in Timișoara in Romania, and was Jewish. His parents survived the Holocaust in Nazi forced labor camps. After his father died in 1956 when he was 11, Andre and his mother moved to Israel. He served in the Israeli Air Force and attended Israel's National Sport Academy, where he studied fencing.
In 1968, he was sent to the Netherlands for further instruction in fencing for further training in The Hague with fencing master Abraham. Most of his first year in the Netherlands he stayed with the Smitsloo family in Scheveningen. In 1971, he married one of his students, Ankie de Jongh, who converted to Judaism. Andre returned to Israel with his wife soon afterward where, at age 27, he became the country's top fencing instructor. The couple lived in Biranit, Israel, along the border with Lebanon. He helped found the National Fencing Academy, and became chief fencing instructor at the Wingate Institute.
The couple's daughter Anouk Yael was born two months before the Olympic Games.
Munich Olympics
The Spitzers went to Munich with the rest of the Israeli team, but young Anouk was left in the Netherlands in the care of her grandparents.
Ankie Spitzer recalled her husband's idealism and attitude towards the Olympics: (While strolling in the Olympic Village) ... he spotted members of the Lebanese team, and told (me) he was going to go and say hello to them... I said to him, "Are you out of your mind? They're from Lebanon!" Israel was in a state of war with Lebanon at the time. "Ankie," Andre said calmly, "that's exactly what the Olympics are all about. Here I can go to them, I can talk to them, I can ask them how they are. That's exactly what the Olympics are all about." So he went ... towards this Lebanese team, and ... he asked them "How were your results? I'm from Israel and how did it go?" And to my amazement, I saw that the (Lebanese) responded and they shook hands with him and they talked to him and they asked him about his results. I'll never forget, when he turned around and came back towards me with this huge smile on his face. "You see!" said Andre excitedly. "This is what I was dreaming about. I knew it was going to happen!" (Reeve (2001), pp. 52–53)
Midway through the Olympics, when the Israeli fencers had already competed, the Spitzers were summoned to the Netherlands – their daughter, who was with his wife's parents, had been hospitalized with an incessant bout of crying. After they arrived, they were told by the doctors that everything would be fine and that Andre could rejoin his teammates at the Olympics. Andre missed his train, but his wife drove him at breakneck speed to the station in Eindhoven, where he boarded the train without a ticket.
Terrorist attack and death
Spitzer returned to Munich about four hours before Palestinian members of Black September broke into the Israeli quarters, killed coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano, and took Spitzer and eight of his teammates hostage. The terrorists announced that they wanted 234 other terrorists freed. The terrorists beat the hostages and castrated one of them, leaving him to bleed to death in front of his bound fellow hostages. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called Spitzer's wife, and told her the Israeli government "would not negotiate with terror." Spitzer's wife asked, "Why not?" and Meir responded, "If we give in to their demands, no Jew will be safe anywhere in the world."
Spitzer was seen once during the hostage crisis, standing at a second-floor window in a white undershirt with his hands tied in front of him, talking to the German negotiators. Spitzer, the only hostage who spoke German and English as he learned it in his younger days, so he was the go-between with the German crisis team. At one point, when Spitzer tried to give the negotiators information that the terrorists did not want the negotiators to have about the killing and castration of fellow Israeli hostage Yossef Romano, one of the terrorists clubbed Spitzer in the head with the butt of an AK-47 assault rifle and pulled him roughly away from the window, back into the room. That was the last time most people saw Spitzer alive.