Survivor of Holocaust, Munich Olympic attack heads back to Germany

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.

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