Table 1 Participants’ perspectives on the disaster the first weeks after the incident
Respondent ID | Role | Gender | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
C1 | Colleague | Female | “You think that is simply not possible. It is not a car accident that you often hear about, so that’s where denial comes from.” |
C2 | Colleague | Male | “[I think about my colleague] every single day. It can hardly be otherwise … I still work in the same building. His enthusiasm and drive can still be felt here.” |
C3 | Colleague | Female | “[I felt] as if I had swallowed a piece of stone, really. I cried a lot. […] I’ve been thinking all the time about how strange life is and what gets lost and how that affects our understanding of the world.” |
C4 | Colleague | Female | “The first few weeks, I think when I was at work, I received a certain kind of attention, because I had known [the victim] for so long. I was just very sad, although I don’t feel that this is the right word, it was actually more than that. I could function though. I slept very badly, I had nightmares all the time.” |
C5 | Colleague | Male | “I am not really an emotional person, but if you lose someone you have a good relationship with, then you just get hit, it is as simple as that.” |
C6 | Colleague | Female | “(I felt) dazed. I was like: this is not possible, because she would have normally travelled a week later [...] You are defeated, you just can’t get over it. You are still hoping that she was not on board and you are looking at your phone [...] it was unreal and it still is actually.” |
C7 | Colleague | Male | “It was crazy, unbelievable and sometimes hard to realize, because nothing preceded the incident, it all happened suddenly at once, so you don’t actually believe it. […] … you are trying to imagine what happened. [You wonder:] Did they notice anything?...” |
C8 | Colleague | Female | “[I] certainly [felt] disbelief in the beginning. That evening and night I was also thinking: she wasn’t on board. You don’t want to know that at all, so you push these thoughts away. Then the next day messages were coming from everywhere [...] What you feel then is sadness and also anger (because of) the way (they died), because I thought that was also a big deal [….]. This was not supposed to happen.” |
C9 | Colleague | Male | ““… we think of the family, friends and colleagues” [...] I believe this has an enormous significance. I think that if you mention something like that during a commemorative speech, when everyone desperately seeks for sympathy and grip, that’s really something therapeutic.” |
C10 | Colleague | Male | “It’s a weird feeling that you cannot define. [During that moment] so many things happen. You don’t know yet what, how. Little by little you get some information, something to hear. You are not family but you are very closely involved … [...] My wife sometimes says: “It is anger that I hear in your voice”, because you had built something together. [...] It feels like family, that special bond you have.” |
C11 | Colleague | Male | “(The first few weeks at work) there was less room for emotions and more energy for work. [...] I noticed that at the moment you are talking about emotions, these become suppressed and (the need to) work comes forth; but when, for example, we were at his house [...], then the emotions hit us twice as hard. I did notice that.” |
N1 | Neighbor | Male | “I actually had to study, but I just couldn’t.” [...] it is about someone you know that was there, it could have been my parents or a friend of mine or something. [...] When I first heard it, I got really angry (at the perpetrators), but once the funeral was over, the anger was not there anymore.” |
N2 | Neighbor | Male | “We were very sad the first few days, I also couldn’t sleep well, but it’s not that I could not function anymore” [...] How should I express that? It’s the fact that they were the next-door neighbors, that hits the hardest. If it was someone who lived farther away or in another village, it wouldn’t be the same.” |
N3 | Neighbor | Female | “It was just murder actually. That has a different impact compared to being in a car accident. This makes you angry. [...] [if it was just an accident] it might have been easier to make peace with it.” |
N4 | Neighbor | Female | “I still find bizarre that when I first saw it on television, I reacted immediately like: this feels really wrong. [...] ....even though I didn’t really know which day she was flying and in the beginning I did not realize that at all. I really had to force my husband to go have a look [...]. I think a lot about [the victim], actually more than when she was alive.” |
N5 | Neighbor | Female | “No matter how crazy it may sound, a car accident is part of your daily life. You don’t want it, but somehow it is part of it. This [the disaster] was so out of place. This is absolutely not how I perceived safety and security.” |
N6 | Neighbor | Male | “I was looking for information and when it was on the news, I was sitting in front of the TV and I also followed the national commemoration and every day when it was in the news I was following it. [...] I wanted to know everything that happened, but it’s not that it controlled my life.” |
N7 | Neighbor | Female | “[It was stressful] that they kept coming … the journalists … and that is something I want to impart: please, when something like this happens, journalists should be banned from coming here …” |