Norwegian pride in the face of slaughter

FRIDAY July 22, 2011, will be a day forever etched in the minds and hearts of the people of Norway as they learned of the horror attacks on the island summer camp of Utøya and of the bomb blast in central Oslo.
For a young group of Norwegian musicians currently visiting East Clare on an exchange programme, there is a feeling of immense sorrow but also incredible pride in their country in the aftermath of this atrocity as they recall the day their world stood still.
Lars Sivelspad Smaaberg (18), who lives outside of Oslo, said he will never forget when the news came through of the Oslo bombing and the subsequent shootings on the island of Utøya.
“It was shocking. I was at work, I work as a waiter and everyone at work just stopped in front of the TV in the bar and stood still and were watching the television. No one was thinking about the customers or anything. They were just standing there. We like many others were afraid,” he said.  
Another of the group Vilde Lavoll said, “What was so shocking was when we went to bed, we didn’t know how many people had been killed on Utøya. We thought it was about 10 and then we woke up the next day and we saw it was 80. We were just totally shocked. We just started crying. I cried for hours. It was awful. It was really a shock to wake up to that.”
Marie Cotland works for Amnesty International and had she not been on holidays, she would have been in the middle of the blast zone in Oslo.
“I was up north on vacation and I got a text from my friend saying there’s been a huge explosion in Oslo. I knew it was right where I worked. The first thing I did was to text Amnesty and ask if there was anyone at work in the area. It took an hour and they got back and said ‘yes there is one girl she is in the hospital. We don’t know how she is doing’. It was just awful. If I hadn’t been on vacation, I would have been right there,” she revealed.
But Marie’s world was turned further upside down when news of another attack on Utøya broke.
“Then we heard about the massacre in the camp and one of our friends was there and she died. She was one of the last ones to be found.
“I remember that night when they told us there were nine or 10 dead, I didn’t even know our friend was there and I just started crying. I just couldn’t deal with it. Then I woke up the next morning and I heard there were 80 and all of a sudden, my friend was missing,” Marie said.
Lars recalled how he learned the stark reality of the situation on the internet.
“When I came home from work, I logged into my Facebook and Twitter accounts and I saw about the Utøya shootings and the people who were there. Their messages on Facebook and Twitter said, ‘Do not call me please, don’t call anyone here because we are hiding, someone is shooting, please don’t call’. Me and everyone else didn’t understand,” he said.
Marie told how her friend had sent a text from the island to her best friend. “It said ‘I love you forever. Remember these words’ and that is the last thing they ever heard from her.”
“They were incredibly brave. There was a story we heard of an 11-year-old boy, who stood up and said ‘don’t shoot me, I am too young to die. You have already killed my father’. They didn’t kill him. He survived because he was so brave,” Vilde said.
Lars believes it is disappointing that the world is only going to know of Utøya for the terrible things that happened there but he told The Clare Champion, “You should have heard about Utøya before this shooting”.
“It is a youth camp and they discuss what the youth can do for the country. Many of them are potential politicians and maybe one could have been the new prime minister,” he said.
Vilde added, “These are our best youths and they are discussing politics, while they are on holidays and they get murdered for it, they just want to make a better world”.
While the atrocity brought with it enormous grief and immeasurable sadness, Marie admits that the way everyone has pulled together in this tragedy has given her and the country a huge lift.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud. Everyone in the whole of Norway – it didn’t matter where you were politically or anything, we all got together. It was like this is not just against the Labour Party, this is against our people. We were so united and I’m so proud of our country and our prime minister,” Marie said.
Ingeborg Hollekim Bringslid explained it had been hoped to hold a parade where people would carry roses through the city of Oslo but this idea was rolled out across Norway and involved so many people, they could not parade.
“Every little city had rose parades. There were 200,000 people on the street of Oslo in a city with a population of 500,000,” she said.
“We could not parade, we just stood there with our roses in the air. It was wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud to be Norwegian. Everyone was there together. I was standing there crying and a complete stranger came up to me and hugged me and said ‘I’m sorry’,” Marie recalled.
Lars said everyone would like things to go back to normal but they know it won’t be the same again.
Speaking about the man behind the attacks, Marie said, “I just don’t even want to mention his name because that’s what he wants. What he wants is publicity. He doesn’t want to be forgotten. All we want to remember is that there was some lunatic that went crazy. We want to remember the people that died and what they died for.”
“We want to remember the people that matter to us,” Ingeborg concluded.