Munich Germany

MUNICH is an easy city to like: clean, bright and livable. It has world-class art museums, stylish shops, wide boulevards, parks and squares. Conviviality overflows in its fabled beer gardens, and its people have an open, animated air. Joachim von Halasz, a London-based financial analyst who often travels to Munich, knows well the attractions of this southern German city, including its towered and turreted Gothic revival Neues Rathaus, which the U.S.

The terrorist in white hat and sunglasses, the one called Issa, steps onto the balcony and threatens to kill another hostage. This is what we recall. A girl named Olga smiles in a perfectly girlish way, in pigtails. A day before, she stood in tears but now she is triumphant, throwing her hands into the air to wave at the crowd. The memory endures.

Swede, Pole Win First Gold Ragnar Skanaker, a 38-year-old Swedish businessman, won the first gold of the Munich Games by scoring 567 of a possible 600 points in the free pistol shoot. Poland's Zygmunt Smalcerz won the second gold medal by lifting 744.05 pounds in weightlifting's flyweight division, a division later dropped. Young U.S. Cagers Hungry *--* HEADLINES *--* Limiting Czechoslovakia to three first-half field goals, the United States won its opening basketball game, 66-35.

Spitz Wins 7th Gold Medal, Quits A seventh race, a seventh gold medal, a seventh world record. Mark Spitz, swimming the butterfly, anchored the 400-meter medley relay team to victory, giving him gold medals in three relays to go with those he won in four individual events. He announced immediately afterward that he was retiring. "All the way down that last lap, I kept saying, 'Just a few more strokes and it will be over.' I couldn't wait to get out of the pool."

Olympic filmmaker Bud Greenspan and his late wife Cappy worked the 1972 Munich Olympic Games for NBC Radio. Greenspan, then 44, went from reporting on athletic achievements to a major news event once Palestinian terrorists took 11 members of the Israeli delegation hostage in Building 31 of the Olympic village on the morning of Sept. 5. Using his radio reports as a backdrop, Greenspan has compiled a 100-minute documentary to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Munich massacre.

In awarding the Oscar for best documentary two years ago to "One Day in September," many Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters clearly sought to send a message--to revive interest in how and why the Palestinian terrorist attack on 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games came to be, and in the sheer brutality of the way the Israelis were attacked, held hostage and, ultimately, died. Since then, the movie has been seen worldwide.

Four years after Munich, at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, the relatives of the 11 murdered Israelis began a campaign that so far has proved fruitless--requesting that the IOC honor the memory of the 11 dead at the Games with a moment of silence dedicated solely to the Israelis. Over the years, according to confidential minutes from IOC executive board meetings obtained by The Times, senior IOC delegates have made it plain they do not want to risk causing offense to Arab interests.

The late Jim Murray was in the athletes' village on Sept. 5, 1972. This was his column for The Times. MUNICH--I stood on a rooftop balcony on the Connollystrasse in the Olympic village Tuesday and witnessed an Olympic event Baron de Coubertin never dreamed of and the purpose of which is as arcane to me as the discus, the team foil, the hammer, individual epee, or Greco-Roman wrestling.