The Trial of Anders Behring Breivik and Interviews with Survivors
The trial of Anders Behring Breivik started on April 16, 2012, in Courtroom 250 at the Oslo Courthouse, nine months after the bomb blast in the government quarter and the massacre on Utøya. The question of guilt was not in dispute. What was in dispute in the course of the ten weeks of the trial, after two teams of psychiatrists had arrived at contradictory conclusions, was whether Behring Breivik was sane or not at the time of the crimes. The first team, comprising forensic psychiatrists Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim, alleged that the mass murderer was psychotic and ergo should be declared legally insane. After a heated debate that lasted two months, two new psychiatrists, Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas, were appointed. They presented their findings Tuesday, April 10, six days before the trial started. The press release reads: “The experts’ main conclusion is that the accused, Anders Behring Breivik, is not considered psychotic at the time of the acts on July 22, 2011. This means that he is considered legally sane at the time of the perpetration of the crime.” What are we to believe?
It turned out to be ten grueling weeks. Every slight, trivial phrase that was uttered in the witness stand was cause for delving into the depths that humanity had sunk. That wasn’t the way AUF party members wanted to portray Utøya. They would rather recall swimming, political workshops, karaoke, speed dating, the sun, and strolls along Lovers’ Lane during the summers of 2008, 2009, 2010, and, yes, even July 2011—at least from Tuesday until Friday at 5:15 p.m. But it was no idyll that we got to see and hear about. Far from it. We got to see and hear about the horrifying images and stories of what happened during the almost half hour when the gunman walked freely around Utøya on Friday, July 22. Words such as “nightmare,” “hell,” and “tragedy” are clichés. The way they are used is usually disproportionate to the events or things they describe. “My back feels like hell,” was heard murmured from the courtroom bench where the press corps sat.
The work crew on the mainland and the MS Thorbjørn ferry captain portrayed the young people’s first encounter with the fake policeman. The ferry captain’s testimony began factually: “It was a rainy day. . . .” The captain was also the partner of Utøya’s camp administrator, who was one of the killer’s first victims on the island. Add to that the fact that his daughter was participating in the AUF summer camp on the island when the shooting started. The captain gave his testimony in a low-key, concise, and rigorous manner without unleashing the emotions that one could sense lay just below the surface. Still, with each brief sentence the abyss opened a little wider, as much because of what he didn’t say and didn’t know as what he said and knew. Like when he explained that he didn’t remember whether he saw his partner being killed: “I think I saw it.” Emotional suppression says something about the kind of mental powers that are set in motion when the sight is too overwhelming. The captain had pondered for over nine months and was still not certain whether he saw his partner being executed. In addition, he explained, he had spent the days since July 22 thinking about whether there was anything he could have done differently. Under every pro and contra argument guilt lies concealed—the ghost that haunts everyone who survived Utøya—and it can be as paralyzing as a traumatic sight.
The boat captain left Utøya early, along with Eskil Pedersen and other youngsters. For him escape was the only logical choice. The MS Thorbjørn would be used to transport police and rescue personnel from Utstranda to Utøya when help eventually arrived. Still this rational decision must have been exceedingly difficult to make—to leave his partner, who had been shot and had probably been killed, and the eighteen-year-old daughter who, though he didn’t know it at the time, had taken refuge in a “secure” hideout. It was really heartbreaking when the captain testified that on the way north on Lake Tyri, he got a call from his other daughter, who was eleven years old and with his grandmother just a few kilometers away. The plan was that she should stay on Utøya from Friday to Saturday, so she was calling to ask whether he would soon be coming to fetch her. “No,” the father replied. “Change of plans. It’s really bad weather.”
Prosaic statements such as these, indicating what was and what could have been, made a bigger impression than seeing blood spatters on the wall in the little hall or hearing about the number of bullet casings (fifty) that were found in the cafeteria building. “Each one represents a dead person,” a police sergeant said as he showed a map of Utøya during the forensic report. Numbers and blood convey only to a limited extent what the tragedy on Utøya was about. We don’t understand numbers and blood because we lack reference points. Thus the captain gives us a deeper, more realistic perspective, as when he said that his younger daughter still often cried herself to sleep at night. Wounds were inflicted on July 22, but for the survivors and the aggrieved families, new, unexpected wounds emerge daily and will do so for the foreseeable future.
Presentations of autopsy reports are as alienating as they sound. Coroners, dentists, geneticists, and radiologists used a whole week after July 22 to reconstruct heads in 3D and look for metal fragments that were not apparent to the naked eye. They found, among other things, that twenty-five people were definitely shot in the head and neck and thirty-one were struck in the head, neck, body, and limbs. One died from injuries due to a fall, while one drowned. Three seemed to have died from drowning, but they were not found at the waterside. The lungs looked like those of people who had drowned because they had been hyperventilating after being shot. A total of sixty-nine deaths; the average age was eighteen—the youngest had been fourteen, while the oldest had been fifty-two.
The wobbly gray plastic mannequin on wheels that was used in court to illustrate bullet wounds was devoid of all human attributes. Furthermore, the reports were presented at a grueling pace, allotting between five and ten minutes to each deceased, for whom phrases with key words appeared on the big screen: “A gunshot wound on the left side of the back of the head. . . . Direction from below going upward, slightly forward and to the right. . . . Exit wound on the right side of the scalp; a projectile piece lies loose in the hair.”
The language was clinical and mechanical, not unlike that used by the killer in the courtroom to distance himself from his crime. But while the coroner and police used scientific language in order to shield the aggrieved families and keep a professional distance, the killer used technical language both as a form of obfuscation and to show off military jargon. The technical reports stood in contrast to the emotions evoked among the aggrieved families. Soft gasps filled the gaps in the litany between the statistics and the logistics. The mannequin didn’t have a name or attributes, and it lacked character and individuality. It is precisely the dread that their child, partner, father, or mother would be seen as just a number among the dead that made the families insist their counsels say a few words about each one and put a picture of the deceased up on the video screen.
The coroners could tell us that Utøya had hired a guard, Trond Berntsen, who was shot five times from behind in front of the information house, but the picture on the screen of him with his two children showed us the extent of the loss. The counsel for the aggrieved read out a message from his ten-year-old son, who was on Utøya that day: “You were the best dad in the world.” The girlfriend of Rolf Christopher Johansen Perreau, who was “kind, generous, and joyful,” was present in the courtroom. Lejla Selaci, who was found on the south side of the cafeteria building by gravel road E6, was a “pleasant girl” and “much loved” and spread laughter and joy every day. “We shall meet again, Lejla.”
The counsel for the aggrieved, who struggled to hold back tears when he read the message from the Lejla’s family, probably felt uncomfortable and unprofessional, but it was liberating to see someone give free rein to emotions in the solemn, square area where the prosecutors, counsels for the aggrieved, defense lawyers, and experts were assembled. The words of farewell from the aggrieved families gave the mannequin a face and features and helped to put the autopsy reports into context. The counsel for the family of Utøya’s camp administrator didn’t read out a special message. Instead he referred to what Jens Stoltenberg had previously said about her. That her partner and their two daughters were not able to formulate anything new to say after the report perhaps says more than a thousand words could say under the circumstances.
We heard two short phrases often during the ten weeks: “Head injury resulting in instantaneous unconsciousness” and “They had no shoes on.” It was at the cafeteria building that they ate meatballs for dinner, had a vegetarian spring roll at the cafe, or bought a packet of biscuits at the kiosk. It was here that karaoke, disco, and speed dating were arranged. It was here that Marte Michelet had spoken about the growing Islamophobia in Norway on Wednesday. The Planet Utøya camp newsletter was put together here, in the room next to the kiosk. It was here that the electronic rock band Datarock had signed autographs and hung out with the youngsters after the concert Thursday night. It was here that Gro had talked about her long life in politics on Friday morning, and it was here that a visibly moved AUF leader had informed the others of the explosion in Oslo later in the day. And it was here, in the cafeteria building on Utøya—the safest building on “the safest place on earth”—that thirteen people were killed on July 22.
Thirteen deaths are thirteen too many, but the number is still low considering how many people were in the building when the shooting started. The information meeting about the explosion in Oslo was mandatory. Everyone was there to seek refuge from the rain and to recharge mobile phones. Hence the witnesses who survived the massacre at the cafeteria building heard a long-drawn-out cacophony of unsynchronized ringtones in the ensuing hours. The killer didn’t say anything about all the mobile phones being charged. He didn’t remember much from the cafeteria building except for someone pretending to be dead in the little hall, his head resting on the piano (which he thought was in the main hall), and that he had to reload. He also remembers that he was surprised because the youngsters didn’t run away but remained standing, sitting, or lying in clusters. “It looked very strange. I shot them all.”
The images from the cafeteria building displayed in the courtroom suggested that many youngsters were paralyzed. The press and the aggrieved families got to see the little hall and the main hall as they looked after the youngsters had been carried out, with red dots indicating their locations. They lay close together and partially on top of each other in the far corner against the wall. The meager consolation for the aggrieved families was the coroner’s oft repeated phrase, “Head injury resulting in instantaneous unconsciousness.” One would have thought that the shooting in the little hall would have scared away the boys and girls from the main hall, which is separated by a thin wall, but surviving witnesses said that it was impossible to discern where the shots were coming from. Nothing is mentioned of what the young people did before they were killed—whether they were paralyzed or trying to escape or hide—but some details emerged that gave an inkling of how terrified they must have been. One youngster was shot through the right wrist, probably because he had lifted his arm to shield his face.
The police superintendent testified on where the dead were found and what clothes they were wearing. The information on clothes tells a lot about what went on before, during, and after the killings. Most of the youngsters were wearing clothes one often uses to relax in or changes into after having been soaked: leisure wear, jogging pants, or jeans. Many were wearing gray hoodies with the AUF logo, which were especially popular among rookies. And, as the police superintendent often repeated, they were not wearing shoes. They were allowed to wear shoes inside the cafeteria building during lunch, but during the information meeting the ban came into effect again. Consequently one of the starkest images from the courtroom was a picture of the entrance to the cafeteria building carpeted with rubber boots, sneakers, and sandals. Hundreds of boys and girls ran out of the building in stockinged feet.
The defendant didn’t pay much attention to the words from the aggrieved families conveyed via their counsels: She was “engaged and positive.” He wasn’t “afraid to stand out.” Her favorite quote was “Before you judge me, try hard to love me.” She was “very much a daddy’s girl.” He had a “big heart.” She was “like the sun to us.” He was “a splash of color.” He was interested in “local politics and women.” The prosecutor and the judge were brought to tears. It is the most reasonable reaction to the autopsy reports and the words from the aggrieved families. The defendant followed with interest when the coroner was describing the entrance and exit wounds on the mannequin, but he was fairly quick to look down in his lap when photo portraits of the dead came up on the video screen.
“The red dot represents the body,” the police superintendent said in Courtroom 250. In the end there were ten dots in the picture of Lovers‛ Lane. The dots were placed close together, partly on top of each other, and some against the fence. One of the dots was Tore Eikeland, the twenty-one-year-old leader of AUF Hordaland. He was described as “caring” by his family. Words such as “kind,” “joyful,” and “creative” were often used in the descriptions of the dead from Utøya, but there were also characteristics that separated them from the average youth: “strong sense of justice,” “wants to create a better world,” “socially engaged,” “was never afraid to stand up for the weak.” These values formed the basis for their political engagement. They may sound like empty phrases, but they were the ones that got them killed in the first place. Eikeland’s counsel quoted from an article he had written: “It may be appropriate to ask how much of the short time one has on earth one will use to fear what’s alien and rage against our fellow men. And how much one will use to make life better for others and to help to ensure that everyone’s welfare is taken care of. Let us live for each other!”
Instead they died for each other. The defendant argued in court that they lay down and waited for him. It was more likely that they tried to hide and kept together as a group. Twenty-five bullet casings were found among the victims and up to ten meters away from them. It was likely that the first shot was fired from a distance, followed by what the defendant called “follow-up shots” to the head. For the aggrieved families it was no trivial matter to know the order in which the shots were fired and from what distance. Clear answers leave less room for conjecture, and hopefully it would be a relief for them knowing that the first shot was fatal. Their loved ones hadn’t suffer after all. The coroner’s conclusion was sometimes discouraging: “The sequence of shots cannot be determined.”
The victims had not only parents, but also elder brothers and younger sisters. Sibling grief is just as consuming but often different and usually not channeled through the established support system. Brothers and sisters identify more strongly with their siblings‛ fate. The NRK spoke with some siblings who said they had images in their heads in which they were running on Utøya, pursued by the killer. Even though they had never been there. Even though they were not AUF members. The killer didn’t strike just the sixty-nine with his weapons. A message from a sister that was read by the counsel for the aggrieved during the trial revealed that the shots fired on Lovers‛ Lane had trajectories that extended farther than anticipated, with equally far-reaching consequences. The sister has Down’s syndrome, and she responded to the news of July 22 with, “But he promised that he would look after me forever.”
The defendant made many miscalculations. One of them was his idea of using Lake Tyri as a weapon of mass destruction. In his mind he thought it would be impossible to swim the six hundred meters from Utøya to Utvika (the shortest route), especially under a stressful situation. Not that it’s easy, but he didn’t take into account that people are strong willed when their lives are at stake. Several youngsters also swam from the opposite side of the island, facing a seemingly endless unknown. The five who were killed on the slope below Lovers‛ Lane on the west side may have considered swimming away, but they clung instead to the thirteen-meter-high steep cliff. He shot them. The youngest had turned fourteen five days earlier. She had just finished the eighth grade. She had dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. “Rest in peace, our beautiful angel.”
Four of the five killed on the slope were transported to the mainland by boat around half past nine. Three of the eight killed by Stoltenberget/Bolsjevika were also transported by boat from Utøya to Storøya the same evening. It is evidence of another miscalculation the defendant made. He waited for the Emergency Response Unit. Meanwhile, he had to cope with the boatmen. He fired at the boats because “they tried to pick up political activists from the AUF’S indoctrination camp,” as he put it in court. While police were on the way from Hønefoss and Oslo to Storøya and had the little red police boat, local residents and campers went out with their private boats. They not only saved many young people from the water and helped with evacuation efforts after the killer had been arrested, but they also witnessed the consequences of the massacre at very close range. Oddvar Hansen, a resident of Utstranda, testified in Courtroom 250. He was just one of many boatmen who had horror stories to tell about what they saw that afternoon: “They looked like dolls.”
A fifteen-year-old girl who was shot by the slope below Lovers‛ Lane had big plans for her life. She wanted to become a lawyer. She died next to a girl who had turned fourteen five days earlier. She was going to be a fashion designer. A sixteen-year-old killed in the same area wanted to work with disadvantaged kids. A boy who died at the Stoltenberget promontory was going to work with children and youths. An eighteen-year-old girl from Bergen wanted to become a doctor, and her dream was to work for Doctors without Borders. A girl from Namsos was going to be a veterinarian. She died in the main hall. A fifteen-year-old was going to be a video game designer. She died by the pump house.
There wasn’t a single case in court in which it emerged that the dead youths wanted to devote their lives to legislating cultural Marxism into the fabric of society. They were going to be teachers, musicians, photographers, and cooks. That is not to say that none of them would have ended up as politicians. Tore Eikeland from Bergen and Håvard Vederhus from Oslo were both expected to have promising political careers. As the counsel for the aggrieved read out the families‛ words of farewell to the dead after each autopsy report, a multitude of personalities emerged. The AUF offered a socially inclusive community within several communities, on a par with school bands, horse riding, guitar playing, dancing, and soccer training.
The killer and terrorist chose Utøya because he wanted to stem recruitment to the Labor Party and because the island was the most “attractive political target” that summer. In his mind the AUF summer camp was a “legitimate target,” and he was proud of his precision, both in the choice of targets and the gun and rifle. But he missed utterly. He couldn’t see into the future, and he didn’t see the whole person. He didn’t see the veterinarian or lawyer or chef or nurse; he saw a new prime minister. He confused six hundred individuals with the party’s leadership. It may be that they would take (or would have taken) values such as liberty, equality, and fraternity into their professional lives as teachers or computer game designers. But if these values are reason enough to be murdered, then most Norwegians would be legitimate targets.
Family photographs on the screen and the obituaries make a deep impression. It was as if we were present at sixty-nine short funerals. The defendant was the only one who didn’t shed a tear in Courtroom 250. The words of farewell reaffirmed why these people had been considered a threat to the defendant’s reactionary ideology of purity: “She had a strong sense of justice.” “He stood up for the weak.” “She believed that everyone should be valued equally.” At the same time they remind us that those killed were ordinary young people with very ordinary interests: horses, school bands, fashion, music, boys, Facebook, girls, books. Ismail Haji Ahmed didn’t want to be prime minister of Norway; he was going to be a model and dreamed of starting a dance school. He was killed by the pump house.
“Plans had already been made for the future” was often heard in the courthouse. These must have been the most painful words to write. Plans about study choices and dream careers, bolstered by the belief that one could pick and choose. The visions would gradually have been adjusted and adapted to reality. But the youngsters also had more short-term, realistic plans. They were attending the self-defense course on Friday afternoon; they were going to see Kick Ass on movie night; they were going to hear Jens Stoltenberg speak on Saturday; and on Sunday they were going to pack up their tents and go home to Namsos, Romsås, or Bergen. And then they were supposed to go on summer vacation to Greece with the family, prepare for the first year of high school, take the moped driver’s license exam, or travel to Bulgaria with the school band, as an eighteen-year-old from Nordland was planning on doing. As we know, nothing came of these plans. As to why these uncomplicated, innocent plans were cut short, the answer may be long and intricate, but sometimes it is the simplest answer that sounds truest, as the boatman Oddvar Hansen said in the witness stand: “What happened makes no sense.”
There were not only sixty-nine aborted futures. Many of the youths who survived the massacre testified about what they saw on Utøya on July 22. Janne Hovland said she had planned to become an elementary school teacher but doubted that her dream would be realized unless her energy levels picked up considerably. The days went by slowly. Lars Henrik Rytter Øberg appeared in his high school graduation uniform. Plans to study law had to be revised because his grades were not good enough. He was barely making it through the day. The prosecutor asked Mohammad Abdul Rahman about school. “It’s not good.” She wondered whether he could elaborate. “I think I’ll pass,” the Hamar boy said. Five hundred youths had envisioned how life would turn out. It wasn’t like they thought. They have to improvise and take one day at a time.
Generally the defendant appeared strategically smart and socially intelligent in the courtroom. He toned down the message in his manifesto, showed respect to the judge, and refused to be provoked by the prosecutors‛ at times condescending tones. When he yawned in the course of the sixty-nine autopsy reports, he covered his mouth with his hand.
But when the first witness from Utøya took the stand and the defendant was informed that he had the right to comment on every testimony, he snapped. First, he wanted to challenge party secretary Tonje Brenna on the AUF’S ideological program. Just the sound of his voice appeared to be out of place after she had testified to seeing people who had been shot fall down the slope along Lovers‛ Lane. After boatman Oddvar Hansen’s testimony, he spoke up to clarify that he wasn’t trying to shoot at the boats; he was only firing warning shots. Muhammed Abdulrahman said the killer kicked a girl outside the cafeteria building. The defendant then spoke up and said he never touched anyone on Utøya.
He executed sixty-nine people with the utmost brutality, but the most important thing for him was that he wasn’t shouting for joy, shooting at civilian boats, or kicking a girl lying on the ground. He had been wronged. It was as if his moral integrity rested entirely on whether he had behaved “honorably” or not during the massacre. At one point he was really out of kilter. He was no longer strategically smart and socially intelligent. Parents and siblings had just heard the autopsy reports of those killed around the pump house, and counsels for the aggrieved had read out the beautiful obituaries of the deceased. “Her dreams are buried in the ground.” Lawyers and judges cried. Families wept. Then he thought it wise to say something.
After the lunch break he was allowed to speak. The aggrieved families went out as he spoke. “There was one place on Utøya I was attacked. It was at the pump house. Someone threw an object at me, hitting me in the face. I just thought I’d mention it.” Poor mass murderer.
His insensitivity in court, coupled with the hurt and self-righteous tone of his comments, was, understandably, provoking to the families. Another heavy rock was thus added to the families‛ burden. Throwing shoes solves nothing. But the applause in the courtroom after a sibling got up, threw a shoe, and shouted, “You killed my brother. Go to hell!” shows that he’d finally expressed a longing for emotional release that had gradually built up over time and especially during the review of the sixty-nine autopsy reports. Finally. “He said and did what many wanted to,” as one family member put it. The passionate reaction was understandable, but the shoe overshadowed the last autopsy reports that were presented in court that day, except for a very strong witness testimony by Munir Osman Humed Jaber.
The survivors‛ stories change in line with new knowledge and insights. They were present at the cliff on the west side or the campground and saw their friends being executed, and yet (or probably because of what they saw) their memories are full of holes. There is so much that has been lost or distorted. The space-time continuum has shifted somewhat. It may have been here, or it may have been there. “I don’t remember.”
An eighteen-year-old told the court how he had to jump over three bodies on Lovers‛ Lane. The prosecutor could affirm that there were ten bodies there. He saw only three. And he remembers the flowers. The prosecutor also told him where he had clung to the rock wall for three hours, but when he was asked to show it on the photograph, he pointed consistently to a different location further north, as if he was hesitant to alter his memory. A twenty-year-old girl testified to what she saw at the southern tip as she swam from there to the mainland. The police statement is full of gory details. On the witness stand they had to be tempered. No one was shot at the southern tip the first time the killer was there. But she remembers it clearly. Perhaps she projected the images into her mind then and there; perhaps she confused others‛ experiences with her own. A twenty-one-year-old girl swam toward the mainland and recalls that a boy was shot dead behind her. He had brown curly hair. But according to the prosecutor, no one died there.
Their narratives are theirs alone. They saw what they saw, and all their narratives were included in the statements they made to the police in the weeks after July 22. The most intense memories, often unpleasant, form the foundation of the stories from Utøya. When this is shaken, the whole edifice starts to crumble a little. If the foundation is not true, how do I know whether all the other things are true? Their attendance at the court proceedings, with all their doubts, uncertainties, and nervousness, came at a much greater cost than the rest of us can fathom. A girl who took the witness stand was asked whether she was currently working. No; she has no energy left. “I struggle just to get into the shower.” Yet she told her story in front of the mass murderer, the judges, the press, and all Norway.
The Utøya survivors cope with their traumas in different ways, but all strive to find structure and meaning in something incomprehensible and to fill the gaps in their own memories. They will be doing that for the foreseeable future. As a seventeen-year-old girl put it, “It’s not as if what happened will go away. It’ll never go away.”
When the AUF members want to highlight something positive from July 22, they often mention dinner. It is served at one o’clock on Utøya. Outside it was cold and wet, but inside the cafeteria building the atmosphere was good at the serving counter. The servers would say, “Remember, you are amazing,” as they doled out the food. The originator of the phrase is the Pollyannaish Ina Libak from Akershus.
Ina was washing dishes when she heard gunshots outside the building. She ran to the little hall, where she hid behind a piano. The twenty-one-year-old was shot in the hands, chest, and jaw. Yet she managed to run out of the cafeteria building. She stopped at the gravel yard between the outhouse and the waffle stand to try to stem the bleeding. As she explained in court, “With four to five gunshot wounds and arms that don’t function, it goes without saying that you don’t have enough hands.” She collapsed and thought, “This is what it’s like to die.” She was about to give up when a boy picked her up and carried her into the woods on the north side and down a steep cliff at the decrepit skateboard ramp twenty meters away from the pump house. There she lay for a while that felt like an eternity, surrounded by good friends who used T-shirts and rocks to put pressure on her wounds. Even when the gunman shot more youngsters at the pump house and then went off on the path just two meters away from them, they didn’t leave her. One whispered, “They’re dying, they’re dying; we’ve to save them,” while another retorted, “Now we’ve got to lie damn still.”
Ina laughed when she testified about the incident in court. She thought it hilarious. “It seems your outlook on life is more positive than the norm,” said the prosecutor. The people in the court could easily confirm the truth of that opinion. We saw a woman who had decided that the defendant would not be allowed to make her lose focus on the bright side of life, even though she had to admit that feelings of insecurity had become part of her daily life. The laughter that regularly broke out in the courtroom during her testimony was liberating, in much the same way as the earlier tears had been. The court learned a little more about what happened on Utøya on July 22 but also learned something important about life’s indomitable will, compassion in practice, and the contagiousness of optimism.
When the twenty-one-year-old was being evacuated from Utøya and she had to walk the last stretch to the boat because the people carrying her stumbled over the body bags, she met a friend from the kitchen crew. Their meeting was cordial, but Ina asked her friend to look away from her face lest it be too traumatic for her. Her friend then smiled and said, “Ina, you’re very beautiful.”
What made such an indelible impression on people during Ina’s testimony was the disconnect between what she was saying and the way she was saying it. She showed her scars unabashedly to the court and joked that the scar on her face was hard to spot because she had spent so much time in front of the makeup mirror. The smile on her face as she talked about how beautiful the raindrops falling from the leaves were when they were hiding in the bushes contrasted with the quandary she faced about whether it was okay to spit blood on others. The situation was so “special” (the prosecutor’s characterization) that she concluded that, yes, it had to be okay. After that she said there were so many AUF members at Ullevaal Hospital that they could start a small local chapter there, and she noted how good it was for gender equality that the head of the trauma team was a woman. The only drawback was that the woman was prone to cursing, something that Ina herself would never do.
The survivors of Utøya have struggled with many questions since July 22, and some of them start with “if.” “If I had known how dangerous it was, I would have done something,” twenty-year-old Hussein Kazemi said in court. He had come to Norway from Afghanistan in 2009 and had an interpreter with him in the courtroom in case there was something he didn’t understand. It wasn’t necessary. Hussein spoke in fluent Norwegian about how he had joined the AUF just before the summer camp. He barely knew what the youth organization stood for. A friend had told him about the camp, and Hussein had then persuaded two other friends who were not particularly indoctrinated with cultural Marxist ideology to come along.
Hussein had hidden behind the piano in the little hall with some girls but had run out of the cafeteria building when the man in a police uniform had come in from the campground. The girls were killed while Hussein was shot in the thigh. He didn’t talk much about the injuries in court but talked instead about how guilty he felt that he didn’t help the girls, that he had invited the two friends to come with him, and that he had later called out to the killer on the southern tip of the island. “If I had hidden myself better, he would not have come down to where I was and shot the people there.”
“I don’t think that’s something you should worry about,” said defense lawyer Geir Lippestad. That’s easy to say, and in theory the issue at hand is even simpler: just one man is guilty, and he will serve a long sentence. But too many survivors wake up in a cold sweat even after nine or ten months have passed, still bearing a heavy burden on their young shoulders. A twenty-year-old from Buskerud testified about how he dragged a friend down to the floor of the little hall to prevent both from getting shot. Only he survived. He was shot in the head, but when he talked about his problems, it was guilt that troubled him most. He said the first thing he did when he woke up from the anesthetic at the hospital was to apologize for not managing to save his friend.
A twenty-year-old girl from Vestfold was shot in the thigh and developed an inflammation of the hip while swimming to the mainland. She too struggled most with her conscience. She was the head of a county delegation that lost its three youngest members. An eighteen-year-old choked up when he talked about his friend, who wasn’t able to swim anymore and turned back to Utøya and subsequently drowned. “I felt a lot of guilt after I swam away from my buddy.” Guilt because they persuaded people to join the camp and these people never came back. Guilt because they feel they failed in their duties as leaders. Guilt because they dissuaded some from swimming or told them to lie down on the floor of the cafeteria building or run to the left of Lovers‛ Lane. And guilt because they survived.
For those of us who covered the trial it was tempting to focus on the life force of youth, the smiles in the courtroom, and assurances that things would improve and that school curriculums have been completed in the stipulated time. “We won, you lost,” as one youngster said to the killer. Optimism and hope for the future. But the dull, introverted glances spoke their own language, and not infrequently they were followed by short, vague answers about what life had been like since July 22. “It goes up and down.” Behind “down” often lie anxiety, insomnia, social abstinence, depression, fear, loss of energy, emptiness, grief, and concentration problems. Hussein didn’t speak for all of the survivors, but he probably spoke on behalf of too many:
PROSECUTOR: “How has it been afterward?”
HUSSEIN: “It has been hell.”
PROSECUTOR: “What has been difficult?”
HUSSEIN: “Everything.”
He wouldn’t say anything more.
They are young. They should use terms such as “damn,” “hurts like shit,” and “fucking asshole,” and they should say “I,” “me,” and “my.” They did not, in general, in Courtroom 250. Some of this may be attributed to the fact that this is basically a resourceful bunch with a sophisticated use of language and mature reflection, but it is not enough to explain the witnesses‛ systematic attempts to play down the incredible drama of their stories.
We met many survivors of the Utøya massacre with serious gunshot wounds. The youths talked quietly and soberly about what they remember, where they ran, what they thought, and who they met along the way. Often they forgot to say when and where they were shot and how they reacted to being shot. The prosecutor had to come up with friendly reminders and ask a witness to summarize the extent of the injuries at the end. Twenty-year-old Eirin Kjær got up from her chair in the courtroom in a fine yellow summer dress, pointed to her stomach, and said, “It looks a bit weird now, but they say it should be fine.” She was shot four times and has undergone eleven operations. Eirin assured the court that she was otherwise in surprisingly fine form. She was able to do whatever she was doing before, except for martial arts, in which she was not particularly interested anyway. The counsel for the aggrieved had to draw out of her the fact that all was not quite like it had been before. She has an anxiety attack when Bus 20 stops where Bus 26 usually stops. She can’t handle any deviation from the norm anymore.
Not even eighteen-year-old Viljar Hanssen made a big deal of the five bullet wounds inflicted on him on July 22. He joked when questioned about his head injuries. That he could no longer see through his right eye was “practical” because then he didn’t have to look at “him” (Anders Behring Breivik was sitting to the right of the witness stand). And although parts of his brain were gone, Viljar assured us that he still had the most important things: “sense and intelligence.” He also possessed an impeccable sense of humor: “I was in a coma for four or five days, but I don’t remember much of it.”
The young people’s sober, truncated explanations, where the experience of being shot can be characterized as “weird” (Viljar), were well suited to the court’s wish to focus on the undeniable facts, but from a cynical perspective they don’t serve the youngsters‛ cause. They are entitled to criminal injuries compensation, so they would be better served by using the strongest adjectives in their vocabulary and by churning out gruesome, traumatizing images and detailed accounts of the countless sleepless nights they have had over the past ten months. They should not be playing them down and holding back. Which they did. Eighteen-year-old Espen Myklebust was shot in the back and swam out farther and farther away on the west side on Lake Tyri. He was in the water a long time before he was picked up by a police boat. They brought him right back to Utøya, where he was put ashore without knowing whether the killer had been arrested or not. He must have been terrified, in despair, and furious. But he said nothing about it in the courtroom. He talked about the trip to the hospital.
The youngsters did not say “mass murderer” or “killer” or his name. They said “the accused,” “the perpetrator,” or simply “he.” Some did not say “stomach” but “right flank.” Or “superficial” gunshot wounds. Or “incident.” Seventeen-year-old youths shouldn’t be using this kind of terminology. It may be a symptom of another observation from the courtroom: often, almost imperceptibly, they slipped from using “I” to “one” and “you,” although they were still talking only about themselves. Some examples from the witness stand: “One becomes totally apathetic.” “Then you could feel the pain.” “When you get shot, you only hear the pain.” A psychologist might explain this as a need to distance oneself from what happened, to speak as rationally, objectively, and unsentimentally as possible, but it is also a reminder that what unfolded on Utøya spans the individual and the collective. The young people’s experiences are unique and common at the same time. They were attacked individually and as a “we.”
Often one had to read between the lines to understand what was being said or interpret words in the context of a witness’s body language. The youngsters plied the art of interpretation at an advanced level. Eighteen-year-old Cathrine Trønnes Lie was shot in the back and the arm on July 22 and lost her younger sister on Utøya. The prosecutor asked her in conclusion how she was doing at present. “I feel good enough,” she replied. The “enough,” her facial expression, her tone of voice, and the ensuing silence made it clear that “I feel good enough” was a euphemism for “I feel totally like crap.”
Some of them had begun to put July 22 behind them, but the trial brought memories to the surface again. Such was the case for all the people who were on Utøya. It was especially so for those called to testify. They all tackled the challenge in their own way. Some chose to remain anonymous, some couldn’t bear to attend, and others made themselves available to journalists and photographers after their testimonies. Some requested that the killer leave the courtroom, while for others it was essential that he be present as they had a message to deliver.
After twenty-year-old Hussein Kazemi had testified for one hour, he made a final appeal, with eyes fixed to the right, where the killer sat: “Utøya was my first encounter with AUF members, but I can promise you that it’ll not be my last. Those who were killed on Utøya had hopes and dreams. I’ll continue to go to Utøya to continue to fulfill their hopes and dreams.” Others closed their testimonies with more rousing exhortations: “We won, you lost! Norwegian youth can swim!” Several of the girls appeared in summer dresses. Fifteen-year-old Ylva Helene Schwenke had nothing against showing off her scars. On the contrary, the intention was that “he” see them. “I’m not afraid to show them. I look at it as a victory. We’ve paid a price for democracy, and we won. I may not be proud of them, but I wear them with dignity,” she said.
An eighteen-year-old girl appeared to be quite fragile. She was on Utøya not because she was particularly concerned about the EU, power plants, or the Middle East but because a friend had convinced her to go a few weeks earlier. She testified with brevity, informed by the gravity of the moment. In closing, counsel asked about her future plans. She had been planning to work with children and youth, but because of gunshot wounds in her back she could no longer work with young children. So now she was thinking about working as a psychiatrist or a prison guard instead. Did the defendant get the implication? It seemed that way. He smiled his nervous smile.
No one made anything of Tarjei Jensen Bech’s clothing during his testimony in the courtroom, but in an interview afterward the twenty-year-old from Finnmark in northern Norway explained that he had put on the indigenous Sámi costume to send a message to the mass murderer, who thought that white Norwegians were Norway’s indigenous people. His testimony also revealed that when he and several of the seriously injured were taken from Utøya by boat, they began to sing a Queen song. But they found it inappropriate and sang “We Are the World” instead. He said that was more suitable and looked at the defendant. The song wasn’t a random choice. The Utøya choir was supposed to perform it on the outdoor stage on Saturday, and only “My Rainbow Race” was more ideal as a cultural Marxist protest song.
Prosecutors and counsels for the aggrieved aided the youngsters in their testimonies by asking them questions that underscored neither the course of events nor guilt, nor sanity, but that served to illuminate the consequences of the crimes. Witnesses were asked to describe what they were thinking while they waited for help, how their surgical operations had gone, the consequences of gunshot wounds, and the long-term psychological effects of their ordeal. When a witness was younger than sixteen and/or had just joined the AUF and/or had no key position in the youth organization, these facts were emphasized, and it was pretty obvious for whom the message was meant: the defendant.
The youngsters had to balance their words delicately. On the one hand, they couldn’t show their most vulnerable side because it would make them weak and the defendant strong. On the other hand, they had to express how much their lives have changed since July 22. They couldn’t be too angry or aggressive, and they couldn’t use rhetoric that made them appear to be hateful or vengeful. Subtle signals, however, were an acceptable way to vent their feelings and frustrations. Others chose a more direct form of communication. At least one girl who testified did so. The eighteen-year-old had a refreshing vocabulary. The defendant was called “that jerk” and “that thing,” who also, obviously, was “lacking in social skills.” But she also had another message for him that was somewhat drowned out among the invectives. When asked by counsel about how she was doing at present, she answered that she was doing fine. “It’s worse for him, who has to live with what he’s done,” she said, pointing at him. In addition, she said that after July 22 she had become much more politically active, and she rattled off her new party duties. Hence her final word was directed at him and it was, “Thanks.” He looked down and smiled his nervous smile.
It was uncomfortable when he smiled at the wrong time, as he often did, but it was even more uncomfortable when he smiled at the right time.
The smile of the mass murderer of July 22 has been an issue since the trial began. On one of the first days he tried to refute the allegation that he had smiled, laughed, and expressed joy when he had killed sixty-nine people on Utøya, injured many, and tried to kill the rest by scaring them into Lake Tyri so they’d get cramps and drown. He was indignant and said that the rumor stemmed from a single person. “Are you always in control when you smile?” prosecutor Holden asked. “Yes. No. Yes.” He had already admitted that the smile was a sign of nervousness, a defense mechanism. But he said that it couldn’t have happened on Utøya, as what he did there “was nothing to smile about.”
At least three witnesses at the trial affirmed that he had smiled as he killed people on Utøya; two of them heard shouts of joy, while several said that he looked satisfied during the massacre. The issue of his smile, laughter, and shouts of exhilaration evolved into the hub around which the trial revolved. Prosecutors and counsels for the aggrieved asked questions that ran the gamut, including what the witnesses heard the killer utter, while the defense consistently asked questions only about his appearance, his behavior, and his expressions. After the last AUF members from Utøya had testified, he took the stand and reiterated that he had never smiled or laughed on Utøya. That issue was crucial to him.
His emotional state was key in determining whether he was sane or not. Each time there was a reply of “No” or “Nothing” to the question of whether a witness had heard him say something weird or whether there had been something peculiar about his behavior on the island, the defense’s claim that the killer had been fully aware of what he was doing on July 22 was bolstered.
He smiled often in court. He smiled as prosecutors attempted to “mock” (his word) him about his network, his visions of being a knight, and his homemade uniforms, and he smiled as witnesses gave evidence. The first time was when the AUF general secretary testified that she heard shouts of joy from Lovers‛ Lane. He grinned and shook his head. And he smiled when the witnesses pricked him with barbs such as “That jerk” or “He looked like a neo-Nazi.”
When he smiled at inappropriate times and during inexplicable moments, our suspicion that he was on a different planet from the rest of us was reinforced. Far worse was when he smiled along with us. Fourteen-year-old Ylva was shot five times on Utøya, and she spent a lot of time in rehabilitation after July 22. Counsel for the aggrieved wondered how things were going at school. “They’ve gone well,” she said. “Actually I’ve never had such good grades before because now I don’t have to go to gym, so my point average has gone up,” she said with an infectious laugh. The judge smiled, the families smiled, the journalists smiled, the prosecutors and counsels for the aggrieved smiled, and he smiled. Suddenly he was part of our community; he shared our closeness and relief. We were in this together in Courtroom 250. He went from being a “he” or “the perpetrator” or “that thing” to a human being with a face and a name: Anders Behring Breivik. If he could laugh at the same things we could, could he not also cry at the same things?
For the court the smiles, laughter, humor, and tears were relevant in determining not only whether he was sane and whether he was capable of showing healthy human reactions, but also whether we could place him outside or within our community. The most expedient thing to do was to dismiss him as a random outcast on the periphery of Norwegian society, a man who couldn’t act otherwise because he was either sick or a robot. It was more uncomfortable to see him as sane, as someone from within, a man who could not only snicker at us, but also smile along with us.
In at least one instance it was apparent that even he was aware of a drift toward the community that he didn’t condone. He strangled his smile and strove to recapture his rigid mask. He was on the verge of laughing, a non-nervous laugh, and he quashed it. It was a consolation of sorts. We didn’t want to laugh along with him, and he didn’t want to laugh along with us.
The trial ended on June 22, 2012. The verdict was due in August. In the meantime the first anniversary of the attack was commemorated in Oslo and by Lake Tyri. During the commemoration after speeches by (among others) Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, union leader Roar Flåthen, and AUF leader Eskil Pedersen, the aggrieved families reacted to the fact that there had been too much emphasis on the Labor movement. It was just a foretaste of the debate to come on the future of Utøya. The AUF wanted to “take the island back,” while various groups of aggrieved families wanted it turned into a memorial. About fifty thousand people showed up at City Hall in Oslo on July 22, 2012. The weather was as gray and harsh as the year before. Many brought red roses. “We said we would die together. Some die young,” sang the Iranian-born Swedish artist Laleh, and the song brought forth tears even from royal eyes. Singer Lillebjørn Nilsen was last out with “Goodnight, Oslo” before the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and church bells played “To Youth.”
The verdict was handed down on August 24. He was pronounced legally sane by the judge. Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to twenty-one years of preventive detention.
Over the autumn there were several debates in the public arena. The main issues were the future of the government quarter and Utøya; the killer’s childhood; his prison conditions; the failure of the system; closing off Grubbegata; a vote of no confidence against the government; and the fact that right-wing extremism in Europe these days had a Norwegian face. But life returned to normal in its own muddled, bumpy way. The wave of sympathy toward immigrants that was evident after the terrorist attacks dissipated. The Labor Party gleaned no more sympathy votes. Youth, to which we sang an ode at the one-year anniversary, was again pushed into the background. Maybe it was a blessing. Silence and the daily grind. Banalities. Routines. Many would have wanted it that way. We’re done with it. Let’s move on. But the story isn’t over. The consequences are still not clear. Life has just begun. We still don’t know what it means to be bombed in a terrorist attack and targeted by a mass murderer in secure, innocent Norway. On December 14, 2012, an AUF member posted a message on Facebook that he has long feared becoming victim number 78—the first of the survivors to commit suicide. The following Monday he admitted himself to a psychiatric ward. He was exhausted but wished to live.
How has life been since the trial? I asked a handful of July 22 survivors this question just before Christmas 2012, four months after the verdict was handed down. All were interviewed for this book, but here they remain anonymous so that they could speak freely.
A boy, barely sixteen in the summer of 2011, says that he has been very depressed during the past year and especially during the trial. The Oslo boy didn’t know how he should feel, and he read everything he came across on Facebook and blog posts to get an idea. Many said that things were much better now. He didn’t feel the same way. He felt just as bad, maybe worse. Nowadays he is in stable condition. Stable but poor, that is. “The most positive thing I’ve gotten out of the last year may be that of feeling relatively bad over a period of time. I think that must be a good experience to have. One also thinks in different ways when one is depressed like that, so I’ve gotten a lot of good out of it too.”
The year started well for a twenty-one-year-old girl who was originally from North Trøndelag County. Was it right to feel good after only half a year? She felt guilty and forced herself to think about July 22 so as to be sad. She was in good shape until the trial neared. Then she broke down. She cried and cried without really knowing why. She wasn’t dreading the trial. Her depression came to an end when the trial started on April 16. She felt a sense of victory from seeing him so powerless. The plan was to follow the trial every day, but exams got in the way. The last day of the trial was dreadful according to her. Possibly she had expected that it would mark a transition from the old to the new. She traveled by plane that day alone and burst into tears.
The one-year anniversary commemoration was fine. “For once the focus was on the victims again and not on Breivik,” she said. But the same ambivalence emerged. She and several of her friends were trying to be sadder than they actually were. It wasn’t possible to say that she was doing fine, although she was actually doing fine. And there’s no real reason why you should miss your friends more on a specific date, is there? It is unreal every single day that they’re gone. “And it’s absolutely unreal that I’m fine, that life continues as before, and that the front pages of the tabloids can return to the usual trivial news of summer, even though this happened not so long ago. That, I think about quite often.”
Now days may go by without her thinking about July 22. She had never imagined it would happen. It may happen that she feels guilty about feeling good, especially when the subject is brought up by other AUF members, who, according to her, have difficulty understanding why people react differently. She has changed. She has a more laissez-faire attitude toward life. She cares less about the little, unimportant things. “However, I care more about the little, important things. And now I start to cry when I see romantic and sad movies. I don’t like that very much,” she says. Her boyfriend’s mother says it’s an indication of high values. “So there’s a positive side to everything.”
A girl from southern Norway, who was nineteen the summer before, says that now several days may go by without her thinking about July 22. She no longer hyperventilates when she hears loud noises. She is no longer worried that things that one can’t imagine happening will happen. She can now walk into a room without checking where the emergency exits are. “I worry about ordinary stuff. Exams, that I’m too fat, that I need to exercise more, what to have for dinner, whether to buy beer or potatoes at the store, and that guy who. . . .” She has a guilty conscience about letting life pass her by. And sometimes she misses herself as the survivor associated with Utøya. The girl who was known to be so wise, thoughtful, and wonderful. The girl who had gone through so much, but who still stood upright and resolute.
A twenty-five-year-old boy from Oslo was on Einar Gerhardsen Square by chance at 3:25 p.m. on Friday afternoon, July 22. He was critically injured and has since spent much time in surgery and rehabilitation. Yet it was the trial that was the most difficult ordeal for him in 2012. He was supposed to testify and had never been more nervous. He had to omit certain details in order not to break down. “I felt, for some strange reason, that it was important to show the other slightly younger witnesses that the testimony would go well.” He is in better shape physically, even though he can’t jog anymore. “That’s a real bummer.” The bright side has been the outpouring of support. Strangers have hugged him. He has since gotten a new job and is getting married. He is still scared when he hears loud noises, and he gets sad easily and starts to cry about “very small matters.” It cuts both ways. “On the other hand, I’m quicker to value and appreciate the stuff I hadn’t thought so much about before,” he says and adds, “Fortunately, I’m more happy than sad.”
An AUF member from the Mjøsa lake district, who was twenty in summer 2011, started the year with renewed initiative. He was finally ready to resume his studies. But when the trial began, he broke down. He couldn’t sleep. His doctor gave him anti-anxiety medication and he went into therapy. The fact that he was not designated as a victim, just a witness, irked him. This also meant that he was not allowed to enter the courtroom. He wanted to see Breivik and try to understand who he was. However, he managed to enter the courtroom for a couple of days as a chaperon for a victim. He felt no hatred. “I came to the conclusion that I’ve a view of humanity that makes it impossible for me to hate someone. In my world everyone is basically good, and the fact that people end up on the outside and commit gruesome acts is a result of poor choices and their environment,” he says. Thinking about why no one had been able to help Breivik only gave him more reason to be angry. “That feeling I still have today, and it has changed me forever.”
It has been agonizing to follow the debate on the scapegoats. As he sees it, politicians and government officials have been condemned in the media. “I’ve wanted to scream in despair and anger.” There’s only one person to blame, and that’s the perpetrator. The debate on the failure of the emergency preparedness services has demolished the dignity associated with July 22. “It has been very painful.” The same applies to the debate on the future of Utøya, which has driven a wedge between the AUF and the bereaved.
Now he has moved to another town and feels he is starting to reclaim his life, one step at a time.
An Oslo girl characterizes the year as “eternal.” She was nineteen in summer 2011. The year sort of never came to an end. Life was put on hold once again in anticipation of new significant dates—incarceration meetings, the trial, the first-anniversary commemoration, the verdict, the commission report, parliamentary hearings. She wished she had known about the ramifications of those dates so that she hadn’t had have to postpone everything. At one point she and others had worried that the attention would end, that people would stop caring, and that they would be left alone with their traumas. “But it’s almost as if the opposite has happened, where you yourself want to move on and others want to bring it up over and over again.”
One of the most difficult problems to deal with has been to separate the private from the public. July 22 is her story, her trauma, her dead friends, her perceptions, her nightmare. July 22 is also in the public domain. Others know the details better than she; they can reconstruct the sequence of events perfectly, and they know all about the manifesto. “I’ve kind of lost ownership of my own story; my thoughts and emotions have been inquired into, investigated, excavated down to the last morsel because they all want to immerse themselves in our personal experiences. It’s pretty frustrating when one’s identity, emotions, and story are linked to this event and the case is lifted up to such a high professional level that we don’t even know what’s happening. If you know what I mean?”
She has given her time to so many: psychologists, doctors, municipal support teams, police, the National Criminal Investigation Service, lawyers, journalists. It has been nice to talk to people who understand and who ask the right questions. But it has also been difficult. She has had long conversations with pleasant journalists but then discovered the next day that they hadn’t understood certain things or had chosen to angle the story cynically. One journalist opened the interview with a fixed stare and said in a trembling voice, “Oops. This is the first time I’ve faced a survivor.” Totally unsolicited an American journalist who has followed the 9/11 survivors for ten years drew a chart in the air of what her life would be like for the next ten years. It looked like a stock price chart showing mostly troughs. “What can you say? Thanks?”
People behave differently. Peripheral friends try to get closer. At Christmas parties people look at her with doe eyes and want to know how she’s really doing. And then there are those who need to share their own bad experiences such as neck pain, unemployment problems, and dead relatives. “Maybe people find it liberating that I share my suffering, but I’m not doing it to create a poor-me image,” she says. On Facebook and her mobile phone she is being harassed by a “suicidal stalker.” She often feels lonely, even though she is showered with love. She is alone. She has to fix matters herself.
Several AUF members have said to her that they wish they had also been on Utøya on July 22. “This sounds utterly absurd to one who was actually there, but it’s clear that the spotlight, love, solidarity, and attention with which we’ve been showered probably create jealousy.” In the youth party the survivors are expected to be thoughtful, clever, and accomplished. This causes her to have performance anxiety.
Nevertheless, the year has had some bright spots. One of them is solidarity in the nation, in the organization, and among friends. Her university education has started again. The brain is “back in business.” She feels she had to study for a particular friend who died on Utøya. She thinks that if she doesn’t get good grades at Christmas, the mass murderer will have won. And that he will still have control over her. But if she gets good grades, she will be free. She cried and cried when she got an A and A+ on the midterm exams. “These weren’t just grades; they were victory.”
The year has been marked by contradicting emotions. “On one hand, you want to move on; you want to be free to focus on all the parts of you that aren’t Utøya; you want to put it completely behind you. On the other hand, you don’t really want to let go; you want to be in it, re-experience it, feel it. It has been difficult to have these two sides all the time, especially when you have to make choices about things like projects and interviews. In a way you become very serious, solemn, pensive. But in another way you long to be amusing, flippant, spontaneous,” she says.
Is there anything here that we can understand? That grades are not just grades but a tribute to a young man who was killed by a mass murderer at a summer camp? That bad grades are tantamount to having lost again?
The observations above are just a slice of the post–July 22 daily lives that go on in the midst of the current debates that, they believe, lie at the core of their experience. The little things, if you will. The impressions we get are multifaceted and might have been different if the questions had been asked on another day. But much is certainly still fragile, painful, and taboo. The way we discuss and debate July 22 affects the survivors concretely, physically, and mentally. Several express ambivalence about being in the spotlight. Some dwell on the past, while others wish to move on. But all of them want to convey how complex it all is. There is still much they, and we, don’t know about the long-term effects of such a dramatic, surreal, and life-changing experience.
The Norwegian short story writer Hans Herbjørnsrud writes in a way that evokes a sense of “prepare for the worst”; it is complex, ambiguous literature that undermines the urge to think in totalitarian, simplified, and comprehensive terms. It is literature to read before an event, not afterward, and it doesn’t provide factual information about Nazism, for example, but evokes empathy and compassion. If Herbjørnsrud’s literary technique is applied to journalism or documentary literature and the public debate in general, we may ask ourselves whether we actually know considerably more than we realize. The answer to emergency preparedness services that failed is not just a matter of closing off streets. We should ask ourselves what lies behind statements such as “He was somewhat right then” or “I’m so tired of July 22” or “I wish I had been there.” And we should ask ourselves whether we, as a community, have done enough to prevent someone from becoming victim “number 78.” Regardless, this should be done ahead of time.