History Book: An Olympic attack

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Monday, September 5th. Happy Labor Day. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Today, the launch of a deep space probe, and the death of India’s most famous nun. But first, 50 years ago this week, the eyes of the world are on Munich, Germany, and the Summer Olympics of 1972. Here’s WORLD Radio summer intern, Anna Mandin.

ANNA MANDIN, INTERN: Early on September 5th, 1972, eight men dressed in tracksuits scaled the Olympic Village’s fence in Munich, Germany. It was the 10th day of the games.

NEWSCAST: This is an ITN News Flash from the Olympic Village in Munich where early this morning armed Palestinian guerillas radied the sleeping quarters of the Israeli team.

The intruders were affiliates of Black September, a militant offshoot of the Palestinian Fatah party. Their targets were Israeli Olympians.

Once inside, they forced their way into one of the Israeli Olympic team’s rooms. Upon entering, they were confronted by a wrestling coach, Moshe Weinberg. The men forced Weinberg to lead them to other Israeli athletes. At one point, Weinberg tried to take a terrorist’s gun. He was killed instead.

A weightlifter, Yossef Romano, also tried to take a gun and was murdered.

NEWSCAST: The guerillas are demanding the release of 250 Arabs held prisoner in Israel. And have set a noon deadline for their release. Negotiations are going on with the German government.

For hours, German police tried to negotiate with them.

NEWSCAST: Nearly 500 German security police have now sealed off the village and are mounting heavy machine guns in the square. The are keeping cameramen, reporters, and spectators well away. The guerillas have just announced that they are demanding to be allowed to fly out of Germany to an unnamed destinations once their demands have been met.

They even tried to raid the rooms where the hostages were held.

However, police realized their raid was being broadcast on live TV.

Instead, they arranged for a helicopter to take the men to an air base, where a plane would be waiting for them. Police were supposed to be disguised as the plane’s flight crew, but all 17 abandoned the mission.

When the helicopter arrived, the terrorists realized that it was a trap. Police snipers shot at them. For two hours police and the terrorists shot at one another. At 12:30 am, the shooting ended. But the hostages weren’t freed. ABC’s Jim McKay put it this way:

Eleven Israelis, five terrorists and one Munich policeman were dead. The Western Germany police were heavily criticized for their weak response. Last week, Germany reached an $18 million settlement with the families of those hostages.

From terrorism to space exploration: last Saturday, NASA postponed Artemis 1’s launch. But 45 years ago, NASA launched Voyager 1.

AUDIO: Ten, nine, eight, six, five, four, three, two, one. We have ignition, we have a liftoff.

Despite its name, the unmanned spacecraft was the second in the mission. Voyager 2 blasted off a couple weeks earlier, but was slated to reach Jupiter and Saturn after Voyager 1.

A day after launch, Voyager 1 sent the first photo of Earth and the Moon taken from a spacecraft. A year and a half later it performed a flyby of Jupiter, and then twenty months later it encountered Saturn. In 1990, it captured photos of the Earth and five other planets in images titled the “Solar System Family Portrait.”

On Aug 25th, 2012, it became the first human-made object in interstellar space.

The two spacecraft were only intended to go as far as Jupiter and Saturn, but they kept traveling and sending information back to Earth. Voyager 1 is now over 14 billion miles from the Sun, traveling at about 17 kilometers per second. It’s expected to stop operating in 2025.

From planet-traveling spacecraft to a world-changing individual:

NEWSCAST: Rosemary, on top of everything that’s happened, we are just getting some dreadful news at Sky Center, we are hearing that Mother Theresa is dead. That report coming to us from radio…

today marks the 25th anniversary since Mother Teresa’s death.

Teresa was born in Macedonia, named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

She says God called her to be a missionary when she was 12. Six years later she moved to India to obey that call. She joined the Irish Sisters of Loreto and on May 24th, 1931, she took her initial vows to become a nun.

For 17 years, Teresa taught at a high school in Calcutta, India. However, in 1948 she felt called to serve the poor in slums and two years later began her own order. She called it “The Missionaries of Charity.” In 1952, she also opened a hospice for the terminally ill. From a 1974 Irish TV interview, Teresa explained:

TERESA: I found a woman lying in the street, eaten up by rats and so on. And I took her to the nearest hospital, and they didn’t seem to want her there. But because I insisted so much, at last they took her in. And from there I decided that I would find a place for them myself and take care of them.

Teresa received the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, a Nobel Prize in 1979 and the highest civilian honor in India, the Bharat Ratna in 1980.

But Teresa endured nearly five decades of internal anguish, even feeling forsaken by God. She once wrote to an advisor that she felt hypocritical speaking as though she was in love with God while feeling so empty towards him.

Several news outlets reported on negligence at homes in Teresa’s order… including a 1994 report on inadequate pain relief and a 2005 article claiming that some children in one orphanage were bound to beds and abandoned on toilets.

Nonetheless, because of Teresa, hundreds of centers have opened in over 90 countries, with hundreds of thousands of lay workers and over 4000 nuns. Pope Francis made her a saint on Sept 4th, 2016.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book, I’m Anna Mandin.

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