Bergen-Belsen:They call him the ultimate survivor: Shaul Ladany lived through a Nazi concentration camp and escaped the massacre of 11 fellow Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Decades later the 86-year-old is back in Germany to visit the two places where he narrowly avoided death. On Saturday, Ladany, who was born in 1936 in Belgrade, in 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.
After that the spry octogenarian will participate in a joint German-Israeli ceremony in Munich on Monday marking the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Olympians by Palestinian terrorists. Ladany, who competed in the Munich games as a racewalker, strode briskly in lime-green sneakers and a beige sun hat as he led his granddaughter, his younger sister and her three children in Bergen-Belsen, which has been turned into a memorial site. He pointed at a plot of land, nowadays covered by blueberry and heather shrubs and tall birch and pine trees, where barracks No. 10 used to stand.
Read: Not bothered about how many runs Virat makes but how he makes it: Dravid
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 the Nazis ransom to free more than 1,600 Jews deported from Hungary.
"It's not a pleasant thing to recall the period here," Ladany said in an interview with The Associated Press at the former concentration camp. But it was important to him to come back and tell relatives about the horrors he endured during the Holocaust, in which 6 million European Jews were killed. It is a pilgrimage he has already made several times before with other family members.
"I always bring here one of my relatives to teach them, to educate them what happened," Ladany said. Even though he was a little boy at the time, Ladany still remembers the constant hunger and enduring seemingly endless roll calls in the cold wind outside the barracks when the guards would count the camp inmates.
The Ladanys 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 at the concentration camp and more than 19,000 prisoners of war, mostly from the Soviet Union, died at the adjacent POW camp.
After being freed in the exchange, Ladany and his family traveled to Switzerland and ultimately moved in 1948 to Israel. There he grew up to become a professor of industrial engineering and management and an accomplished racewalker he still holds the 50-mile world record, set in 1972.