Dan Alon's voice is returning now. It gets louder the more he speaks. It projects farther the more who hear him.

He is Israeli, a father of three and a retired plastics company owner in Tel Aviv. Since February, he has traveled to two dozen cities in the United States and England, sharing a story that is new to many and forgotten by others.

His story is about the 1972 Munich Olympics. But instead of competition and sports, it is a story about terrorism and death.

Mr. Alon, 61, a member of the Israeli Olympic fencing team, was one of five athletes who survived the Palestinian terrorist attack at the Olympic village that year that killed 11 other members of the Israeli team.

He will be at the Fox Chapel Racquet Club on Tuesday night to speak about his experience.

Mr. Alon did not speak about it for 34 years. It was his secret pain: knowing his coach was killed, retrieving the personal effects of his murdered teammates, accompanying their bodies back to Israel on the eve of Rosh Hashana.

"When you are angry, you don't talk so much," Mr. Alon said in an interview. "I was full of anger. First of all, I was angry about the terrorists.

"Secondly, about Israel. I was very cross with the Israeli government that they didn't send us with security. I felt like a [sitting] duck."

Neither his wife, nor kids, nor friends could persuade Mr. Alon to share his experiences of Sept. 5, 1972. But the release last year of Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich" and the persuasiveness of a British rabbi did. The film chronicled Israel's effort to assassinate those responsible for the massacre. The rabbi told Mr. Alon that he had survived so he could tell his story around the world.

A fencer since the age of 12, he was part of an Israeli Olympic team competing in Germany just 27 years after the Holocaust.

Mr. Alon, then 27, arrived early at the village along with a second fencer and the coach to practice with the German team. Faced with a choice of five apartments, each a two-story duplex with its own entrance, he chose a second-story room in No. 2.

His roommate was the team's other fencer; across the hall were two members of the shooting team and a race walker. The fencing coach stayed in apartment No. 1. The wrestlers and weight lifters settled into No. 3.

Before the Games opened, the Israeli delegation visited the nearby Dachau concentration camp. Fencing coach Andre Spitzer, 27, a close friend of Mr. Alon's, was chosen to lay a wreath at the site.

The first week of the Olympics was a blur. Marching into Olympiastadion under the Israeli flag for the Aug. 26 opening ceremony was "a dream come true," Mr. Alon said in a phone interview. He mingled with athletes from around the world. There were no politics, only camaraderie.

Around 4:30 a.m. Sept. 5, that changed. He was awakened by gunshots and shouting. Thinking it was celebrating athletes returning from a late night, he fell back asleep for 20 minutes.

Then he awoke to the unmistakable sound of machine guns.

"In my room, the walls were shaking," he said. "The bullets came into my room from next door."

Black September terrorists had slipped undetected into the Olympic village with the help of at least two confederates posing as workers. They entered the Israeli housing through apartment No. 1, surprising the coaches and a wrestling referee and taking them hostage. They then took the wrestlers and weight lifters hostage in No. 3 and marched them back to the coaches' apartment. Two athletes already had been killed.

Mr. Alon said he could see the terrorists from his second-floor window. Fluent in German, he heard one of them say they planned to kill the rest of their hostages unless the Israeli government released hundreds of jailed Arabs.

He and his teammate, along with two marksmen and a race walker in the other second-floor room, initially considered shooting the terrorists themselves, but without knowing how many there were, the five decided instead to escape.

They crept down a creaky, wooden interior staircase to the first floor and escaped by jumping over the wall of a first-floor deck. They joined two others who had escaped earlier. (Four other Israeli athletes were housed in different locations.)

The rest of the day was a nightmare. A badly bungled rescue attempt by German authorities at the airport resulted in the death of all nine hostages.

Mr. Alon returned to the Olympic village apartments the next day. The Israelis' belongings were scattered about and splattered with blood, as were the toys and gifts they had bought for their children.

The impact of his story has surprised him. In Phoenix, he spoke at the opening of the Maccabi Games this year, and teens waited in line afterward to hug him.

When he arrived at the Los Angeles airport, a woman asked him to speak at a gathering of Auschwitz concentration camp survivors.

At Dartmouth College, he was shocked to learn that many of the Jewish students attending his talk were unaware of what had happened in Munich.

"At first, I was disappointed that they didn't know the story, that they were Jews and they didn't know the history, that this happened at the Olympics," he said.

"I learned that I have a mission now. I want to tell the story to the youngsters. It's important to me. I learned that Munich is like the Holocaust. We will never forget it [in order] to prevent another thing like this. The memory will never go away."

Dan Alon will speak at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Fox Chapel Racquet Club, 355 Hunt Road, Fox Chapel. His talk is presented by the Fox Chapel Center for Jewish Life. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. For tickets or more information, call 412-781-1800 or go to www.foxchapeljewish.com.