"They are holding hostages in the Olympic Village. Come quickly".
[...] We were going back and forth from the balcony to the living room television, wondering where the camera was installed that was capturing everything that was happening just twenty or thirty meters above where we were. The images showed nothing that we couldn't see for ourselves by just bending down a little, and yet everything looked different on the screen. The explanations provided by the second German channel gave us some information: the man with the white hat was called Isa, he was the leader of the Palestinian commando Black September, who had attacked the Israeli building at four-thirty in the morning. One man had been killed, the first Israeli casualty, they had thrown him in front of the entrance of number 31, just before the place was filled with proclamations containing the demands of the terrorist group. They were asking for the release of two hundred and thirty-four Palestinians, as well as Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, threatening to execute the hostages.

Matern was seven years old in 1972, the year when eleven Israeli athletes were cold-bloodedly executed in Munich. The novel is connected to a collective event, the Olympic Games, and to a personal event. Literature here complements the work of history with the emotional intensity that is absent from history books, as the main character lives a story of passion, on the margins of the terrible events.