Tafjord, 3:08 a.m.

“Close the door! Hold it shut!”

The extended family in the local tailor’s house is suddenly awakened. Their house lies next to the shore in Tafjord. Sigrid and Karl Tafjord live here with nine children ages seven to 27. Son Adolf (20) runs down from the second floor to see what is going on. He stops in his tracks. Water is rushing into the house. Then he hears his father yell from the bedroom upstairs:

“Close the door! Hold it shut!”

Cries of terror and screams of pain are heard from animals and people. Something terrible is happening in Tafjord, they just don’t know what.

The parents and the nine children try to hold the door closed, horror-stricken, as the house is washed away and sinks to the bottom of the fjord. But there is another part to the story: Adolf sees the wave crash through the wall of the house. He sees his sister and father be devoured by the water. The wave hits Adolf as he tries to escape through a window. He is dragged out into the fjord by the backwash, unconscious. Then he wakes up miraculously in the middle of the fjord. He clings to a board from the demolished village. Lying out on the fjord he sees what’s left of Tafjord. But then the third and biggest wave, 63 meters at its highest, rears up behind Adolf. He loses consciousness again.

Petra and Anton Kilsti live next door with their three-year-old son Nils. The young couple, who ran the general store, had already lost a child before they had Nils. He was the family’s jewel.

On April 6 Petra’s parents came to visit. They hadn’t been to Tafjord in ten years. They came to see the family and attend the parson’s parents’ birthday party. “Is that a rockslide?” Petra asks, when they are awakened by the sound.

Her husband pulls the curtains aside. But it’s too dark to see anything. Then a violent blast of wind hits the house. The house is filled with light, as if from lightning. They don’t know it at the time, but when the first tsunami hit the village, it short-circuited everything, leaving behind nothing but flickering violet lights. It is in these flashes of light, the survivors recall, that they first realize the extent of the disaster.

The Kilsti family immediately jumps out of bed.

“I was in water to my belt and held my child to my chest as the wave swept over us. Several houses were crushed to kindling as we watched”, Anton Kilsti recalls.

As Anton Kilsti looks outside, he sees something strange approach from the fjord. It looks like nothing he has seen before. Then he hears “a roar as if from a thousand waterfalls,” as the monster wave rises out of the black night.

“Bring the boy!” he yells, “Bring the boy!”

He hopes it’s possible to get out the back window. Here is what Anton reported to newspapers afterwards:

Lights flashed and blinked as the first wave came and took our boathouse. I looked out and saw that the water was as high as the roof. I almost thought the entire mountain had crashed into the fjord. The roar was like Judgement Day. Then the second wave came, which was much bigger. It was terrible. I opened the window and yelled to my wife:

“Bring the boy!” I jumped down on the warehouse roof behind our house. Petra passed Nils down to me, and I told her to follow. But she didn’t. She ran back into the house to alert her parents. I jumped down into the water and mud with Nils. We crawled, jumped over a fence and climbed up to Storsteinen (“Big Rock”, a high point in Tafjord). There I met Mrs. Lina Muldal and her three boys. I handed Nils to Mrs. Muldal so I could run back to my house and help my wife and parents-in-law. Then I saw something terrible on the fjord (probably the third wave). It looked as if the entire ocean was coming at us. It bounced off the mountainsides. I ran back to Storsteinen. I was in water to my belt and held my child to my chest as the wave swept over us. Several houses were crushed to kindling as we watched, he reported.

Lina Muldal is from Fjørå. She knows what has happened. “Langhammaren has fallen!” she says. Her husband had also run to warn his parents. Lina Muldal, her three children, Anton Kilsti and Nils look out at Tafjord from their porch on Storsteinen. They hear screams from the injured and from people in houses flooded with water. Anton and the three-year-old watch their own house, with Petra and her parents inside, get smashed, and the remains get sucked out to sea. The same thing happens to Lina Muldal and her children. They see the house containing their father and his parents disappear into the churning waters.