Five Rings and One Star: From Bergen-Belsen to Munich '72: The Story of Shaul Ladany

by Andrea Schiavon

Overview

5 September, 1972. 4.30 a.m. The Munich Olympic Village. Black September, a group of Palestinian terrorists, break into the Israeli team's apartments. It is the beginning of the most tragic event in Olympic history and, after twenty hours, the day will end in a massacre, with the deaths of eleven Israelis, five Palestinians and a German policeman.

This is the story of the race-walker Shaul Ladany: a survivor. But more than just a member of the Israeli team from those terrible events in Munich, Ladany was a survivor of the darkest period in twentieth century history, having been interred as a child at the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died. For the second time in his life, Ladany has survived history.

Ladany, the world record holder in the fifty-mile walk and a professor of industrial engineering, is one of Israel's most successful athletes, having won dozens of national championships and competed at both the 1968 and 1972 Olympics; he was a student at Columbia University in New York, a soldier in the Six Days War and the Yom Kippur War. From Eichmann to Sharon, from Bikila to All Blacks, from Nixon to Thatcher: they are all a part of Ladany's walk through the twentieth century. Award-winning author and journalist Andrea Schiavon tells Ladany's extraordinary life and, walking with him, chronicles a whole century of events in this astonishing, touching and epic biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913538637
Publisher:	Birlinn, Limited
Publication date:	01/04/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Andrea Schiavon was born in Padua in 1974 and is a journalist for Tuttosport. He won the Bancarella Sport Award in 2013 for Five Circles and One Star.

Andrea Schiavon was born in Padua in 1974 and is a journalist for Tuttosport.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Munich, 5 September 1972 1

2 Fifth birthday, the first bombardments 18

3 A boy, Budapest and Eichmann 29

4 Bergen-Belsen 41

5 The Promised Land 54

6 Shoshana 66

7 New York City 78

8 Eight thousand kilometres, six days of war 90

9 An Olympic professor: Mexico City 1968 101

10 A souvenir of death 120

11 To the sounds of Big Ben 127

12 Munich 1972: Dachau, the race, and the final hours together 137

13 World champion without permission 153

14 To war, paying his own way 164

15 Happy birthday, Dr Ladany 180

16 Surviving is up to chance, living again is a choice 192

Afterword: The first step 296