Harvard Student in Norway: 'It Seems Like Everyone Is Grieving Together'

While most Harvard students learned about Friday’s attacks in Norway from afar, Odd-Jorgen Maeland ’13 was spending the summer at home in Bergen, less than 300 miles away from Oslo.

“[Norway] is small enough that when you hit a summer camp that draws kids from around the country, everybody knows somebody that's a friend of a friend, or a relative of a friend,” said Maeland. “It seems like everyone is grieving together.”

He said that the attacks' impact truly hit Saturday morning, when death toll reports rose overnight from an estimated 16 victims to over 90, an increase due entirely to more reported deaths from the summer camp shooting. (Reports later brought the figure down to 76.)

“We didn't think [a bombing] would happen here, but we always knew there was a chance of something like that happening,” Maeland said. “It's the butchering of the kids that's really gotten to everyone.”

Commemoration of the massacre has been widespread, Maeland said. At noon on Monday, Scandinavian countries observed one minute of silence for the victims. Even traffic and public transportation came to a standstill. Maeland later attended a torchlight vigil in Bergen. The downtown square was packed, he said, with 50,000 people from across the city coming to hear speeches, many from those who knew the victims personally.

“It's etched into everyone's consciousness,” he said. “It will be, even more so, as we see names and pictures of faces of people who've been killed, as we hear more stories from survivors.”

Maeland speculated that the goal of the gunman, a right-wing extremist, “may have been to protest the direction that society’s going, allowing more multiculturalism, more immigration, and more openness, in what's generally been an isolated corner of the world.”

Yet in the end, Maeland said, the attacks have only brought Norwegians closer together.

“The monstrosity of this has broken down every other barrier that might be there between us. It doesn't matter if you're a Pakistani immigrant in eastern Oslo or if you're somebody from northern Norway who’s only ever been around other people from Norway," Maeland said. "You both sent your kids to this camp and they died."