How should journalists talk to survivors of the attacks in Norway? | Helen Pidd

They are still too shocked to speak. I kept my distance but should I even be in their town? ‘I spoke to Roald this morning, and he is sorry, but he can’t talk to you,” said Arne Nysted, the deputy mayor of Bardu, a small town a few hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, when I turned up there on Thursday. “He thought he was doing the right thing by agreeing to talk to Norwegian TV and didn’t realise that by speaking out, he would not be asked to do just one interview but very many, from newspapers and television from all over the world. Now he needs peace.” In Norway, most people’s landlines – and even mobiles – are listed in the phone book. So it was easy for reporters to directly contact Roald Linaker, the army chaplain at Bardu’s military base, to ask him to discuss his son Gunnar, the 23-year-old “calm, big teddy bear with lots of humour and lots of love”, who was one of 69 people murdered by Anders Behring Breivik on Utøya island on 22 July . That afternoon, Roald had received a phone call from his son. “Dad, Dad, someone is shooting,” said Gunnar. Unlike many of the other young people at the Labour party’s annual youth summer camp, Gunnar knew exactly what a gun sounded like. Living so close to Norway’s largest garrison, he could even tell the difference between a weapon being fired manually and on automatic. Many of his friends on Utøya thought they were hearing fireworks when Breivik unleashed his first few rounds. Gunnar knew differently. Later, his 17-year-old sister Hanne said he saved the lives of her and others by shielding them from Breivik’s bullets and telling them to run. He paid the ultimate price. Journalists, wherever possible, piece together a story from primary sources – people who were there when something happened. But what to do when the witnesses won’t talk to you? After I arrived, a nurse on Bardu’s crisis team had gently asked me not to approach Hanne or the three other young women from the town who had survived the atrocities. “It is too soon,” she said. “I hope you understand that.” Roald had asked for privacy. The parents of Anders Kristiansen, the 18-year-old local boy who had not been seen since the attack, were down in Oslo, waiting for police to confirm the grim news. When reporting a death, I have a few self-imposed rules. If I am specifically told to leave the families alone, I won’t go near them. If the police liaison officer hasn’t issued a warning, I will take a deep breath and knock on the parents’ door once, telling myself that sometimes people want to talk about those they have lost. It doesn’t feel good. If they say they don’t want to talk, I won’t return. Sometimes I put a sympathy card through their letterbox with my phone number so that they can call me later “if you feel able”. They very rarely do. I had decided to make the 1,500km plane journey from Oslo to Bardu late on Wednesday night. The idea was to go to a small community that had suffered disproportionately in relation to its population. Bardu, a municipality in the huge Arctic county of Troms, has just under 4,000 people scattered within its tree-covered borders. Of the seven young people it sent to Utøya, two returned in body bags, two came back with limbs in plaster and three with memories that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Of course I wanted to talk to the survivors. I wasn’t the only one. Sitting on a picnic table by the town’s makeshift shrine under a surprisingly brutal Arctic sun, I met another journalist who had been hanging around for days in the hope of speaking to one of the girls Breivik failed to kill. If he couldn’t speak to a victim, there was no story, he said. It would be a waste of time and money. As we sat there, a car pulled up and out hobbled a young woman with one foot and arm in bandages: it was one of the survivors. I recognised her from a newspaper picture taken before she went to the island – Anders Kristiansen, smiling a huge grin, had his arm slung across her shoulder. Now, another young man put his arm around her, supporting her as she hopped a few metres to the town’s millennium memorial, which had become a shrine to the dead. She lay flowers and I stayed put. On Thursday evening, I couldn’t sleep. I’d stayed up late writing my dispatch for Saturday’s paper without speaking to a victim or the families of the dead, relying instead on testimony from the town’s priest, the deputy mayor and friends of those never to return. At 1am it was still light outside, so I left my hotel and got in my hire car, passing the Bible verse the owner had written on the whiteboard outside: Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd. Had I wasted the Guardian’s time and money? Should I have knocked on those doors, I wondered, as I drove past the Beware of Elk sign towards the Ice Peak mountains. I thought of the time I went to Pontardawe the day a young couple from a small village had been murdered on their honeymoon in Antigua. Of driving through Cumbria, trying to find people who saw Derrick Bird kill 12 people in June 2010. Of being on an estate in Bradford, asking the neighbours of a woman who worked as a prostitute how they felt after her remains had been fished out of a nearby river. Should I have been there? Should I be here? I didn’t have an answer. Norway Anders Behring Breivik Helen Pidd guardian.co.uk

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