came back towards me with this huge smile on his face. "You see!" said Andre excitedly. "This is what I was dreaming about. I knew it was going to happen!" (Reeve (2001), pp. 52–53) Midway through the Olympics, when the Israeli fencers had already competed, the Spitzers were summoned to the Netherlands – their daughter, who was with his wife's parents, had been hospitalized with an incessant bout of crying. After they arrived, they were told by the doctors that everything would be fine and that Andre could rejoin his teammates at the Olympics. Andre missed his train, but his wife drove him at breakneck speed to the station in Eindhoven, where he boarded the train without a ticket. Terrorist attack and death Spitzer returned to Munich about four hours before Palestinian members of Black September broke into the Israeli quarters, killed coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano, and took Spitzer and eight of his teammates hostage. The terrorists announced that they wanted 234 other terrorists freed. The terrorists beat the hostages and castrated one of them, leaving him to bleed to death in front of his bound fellow hostages. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir called Spitzer's wife, and told her the Israeli government "would not negotiate with terror." Spitzer's wife asked, "Why not?" and Meir responded, "If we give in to their demands, no Jew will be safe anywhere in the world." Spitzer was seen once during the hostage crisis, standing at a second-floor window in a white undershirt with his hands tied in front of him, talking to the German negotiators. Spitzer, the only hostage who spoke German and English as he learned it in his younger days, so he was the go-between with the German crisis team. At one point, when Spitzer tried to give the negotiators information that the terrorists did not want the negotiators to have about the killing and castration of fellow Israeli hostage Yossef Romano, one of the terrorists clubbed Spitzer in the head with the butt of an AK-47 assault rifle and pulled him roughly away from the window, back into the room. That was the last time most people saw Spitzer alive. After 20 hours of tense negotiations, during which the hostages did not eat and were not allowed to use the bathroom, the hostages and terrorists were flown by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base from which, the terrorists believed,