How are the survivors from Utøya? On July 22, 2011, right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 69 young people on the Norwegian island. Two who got away with their lives tell of their struggle against dark memories and hostility on the Internet
Miriam Einangshaug walked past corpses before leaving Utøya on July 22, 2011. Her friends from the social democratic youth organization AUF lay covered with white towels along a path to the island’s jetty. Security forces surrounded Anders Behring Breivik in his false police uniform a few meters from the pier. Miriam Einangshaug, then 16 years old, saw the killer only this once on the island after only hearing the stomping of his boots.
After the first shots, she and other teenagers ran through the forest to a building with bedrooms. “We put a few of the beds in front of the window and were about to crawl under the others when we heard his footsteps in front of the door.” The assassin paced up and down in front of the bedrooms. He was looking for a gap through which to fire his bullets. Then Miriam heard a bang. It sounded like something was going to explode in her head. “The noise was so loud, it felt like it hit me.”
July 22, 2011 marks the worst act of violence in Norway’s history since World War II
Breivik shot through the wall. The bullet must have struck right over Miriam’s head. Her memory only resumes when she was under one of the beds and no longer on the floor in the line of fire. Somebody must have pulled her away from there. In the dark, she typed a text message to her parents on her cell phone: “I love you.” The next picture that pops up in her mind is that of Norwegian police officers who stormed the bedroom. Again it was men with guns in hand. “At that moment I was sure that now I will die.”
The now 26-year-old talks about her fear of death on a bench in the Botanical Garden in Oslo. She is a young woman who laughs and likes to make eye contact. Only when the conversation not only circled July 22, 2011, but the questions revolve around the attack, does she avert her gaze and star into space. The day before was the last day of her childhood, says Einangshaug. It is difficult for her to tell about the first 16 years of her life. Everything was so normal there, none of it was burned into it as deeply as that day on Utøya. After a while she says: “My youth was okay, I read a lot and was interested in politics. That’s why I joined the AUF. “
Miriam had to choose whose funeral she was going to; Breivik had killed 69 people, many of whom were buried at the same time. With the start of the new school year in autumn, she should find a place again in a world characterized by hormones, school grades and songs full of sadness for no reason. It did not work.
The attacks in Utøya have traumatized the whole country
Her story is one of years of struggle against darkness and despair. She seems to have won it with the help of therapy. Miriam Einangshaug passed the Abitur and Bachelor’s degree, even if she needed more time to graduate due to a lack of concentration. Even today, she says, she doesn’t manage to read a book in one go, her mind wandered after a few pages. For a year she has been involved with “Støttegruppen 22 July”, the Norwegian association to support the victims of the Breivik assassination, the group has 1,600 members. That is her way of moving forward in the healing process, says Einangshaug.
The attacks
On July 22nd, it will be ten years since Norway experienced the worst act of violence in its history since World War II. The terrorist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a self-made bomb in Oslo’s government district, killing eight people. Then he drove to the island of Utøya, where the youth organization of the Social Democrats (AUF) held their annual camp. He shot the teenagers at random. He took the lives of 69 people in the 92 minutes prior to his arrest. His youngest victims were 14 years old.
Breivik was sentenced to the maximum sentence in Norway: 21 years imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention. He is isolated in three cells in Skien Prison. To this day he has never regretted his actions, which he justified with “fear of the Islamization of the western world”. dpa
500 young people took part in the AUF summer camp on Utøya. Those who didn’t get shot ran for their lives. They hid in the forest or under the rocks jutting out from the beach. They heard others pleading for their lives. Many young people, the youngest only 14 years old, like Einangshaug, came from small communities all over Norway. To this day there are problems with psychological help for the victims; not all survivors were lucky enough to find the right therapy, she says. Are there just too few trauma therapists in Norway, which is considered the epitome of a peaceful country? “I think sometimes the will is simply not there. Many believe we should finally get over it. “
The victim representative estimates that one in four of the 5.3 million Norwegians was affected by the attacks on July 22, 2011: They knew someone who was shot on Utøya or who came back from there with trauma. Or they were in the city center of Oslo when Breivik set fire to almost a ton of ammonium nitrate from artificial fertilizer in front of the Høyblokken skyscraper in the government district. Eight people were killed. And yet there is less talk about the attacks from year to year in Norway, says Einangshaug. “Many survivors feel that they are being forgotten.”
One in four of the 5.3 million Norwegians was affected by the Utøya attacks
Where Breivik parked his white pickup truck that day between the former Ministry of Oil and Energy and the office of then Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg on Akersgata street, a crane is now pulling loads up. The successor to the Høyblokken wing, which was devastated in the explosion and then demolished, is hidden behind him, behind fabric with a facade print. Construction fences surround the government district. The successor to the ruling Social Democrat Jens Stoltenberg during the attack, Erna Solberg from the conservative Høyre party, decided in 2014 that everything should be new by 2029, greener and, above all, better protected against attacks. The damaged buildings should give way.
On July 22, 2011, a blast swept through the surrounding streets with their expensive shops and chic cafes. She crushed window panes and blew people over. Splinters of glass and papers sucked from the offices of the ministries rained down from the sky. Almost ten years later, the inner city district around Akersgata appears like a blueprint for the future center of the Norwegian government: modern, polished and, apart from a work of art made of iron roses in front of Oslo Cathedral, without any visible traces of the attacks.
Not everyone was happy that Solberg did not want to preserve the damaged but essentially intact government buildings. Soon there was talk of “history politics with the wrecking ball” and of a government which, with the participation of the right-wing Fremskrittspartiet, showed no particular interest in an architectural reminder of the crime from 2013 to 2020.
10 years after the Utøya attacks
Someone who might one day be sitting in one of the new government buildings in Oslo swam for his life on July 22, 2011. Gaute Børstad Skjervø jumped into the water when Breivik opened fire on the island. “Maybe 500 or 600 meters from the island, tourists pulled me out of the water in a boat,” he says. He had left the small town of Levanger in central Norway with six classmates to the summer camp on Utøya. Børstad Skjervø was the only one to come back.
The now 26-year-old tells in his apartment in the town of Frogner, around 30 kilometers north of Oslo, about how he escaped Breivik. He keeps an eye on the clock. The vice-president of the social democratic workers’ youth league AUF has a lot to do shortly before the anniversary. There is the official memorial of the survivors in the presence of the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg on July 22, 2021. The AUF will organize a summer camp on Utøya in August. And in the parliamentary election, probably on September 13th, Børstad Skjervø wants to move into the next Storting as candidate number four of the social democratic labor party for the constituency of Nord-Trøndelag. His hometown of Levanger is part of his constituency.
Where does he get the strength for all this from? Børstad Skjervø speaks of a defiance that saved him from a dark hole. Breivik wanted to “behead” the AUF when he attacked their summer camp on Utøya, he says. Someone had to take the place of the murdered executives, and why shouldn’t these be the survivors of the attack? It was also part of the self-respect of his organization to organize a summer camp on Utøya from 2015, as in previous decades – but now under the protection of armed security forces. Børstad Skjervø was back on the island for the first time in 2017, where he lost his classmates. “That was difficult,” is all he says.
The youth workers’ league AUF wants to organize a new summer camp on Utøya
Skjervø belongs to a group of Utøya survivors who, if the Social Democrats win the election, will also be assigned a ministerial office in the future government. The price for success seems high. The days of roses that piled up around Oslo Cathedral after July 22nd, 2011 are over. Those who survived the attack and raise their voices in public are insulted, insulted and sometimes threatened with death on social networks, says Skjervø.
The young politician describes a polarization. The question of what happened on July 22, 2011 had the political camps further and further apart. For some it was an attack on the values of the country, which were decisively shaped by the social democracy that had ruled for decades. They also included a society open to migration. No name is more associated with the liberal course than with that of the long-time Prime Minister and mother of the country, Gro Harlem Brundtland from the Arbeiderpartiet. Breivik testified in court that he wanted to behead Brundtland in front of the camera on Utøya because of her stance on immigration policy. This did not happen because the former head of government had ended her publicly announced visit to the party youth earlier than planned.
To others, says Børstad Skjervø, the attack seems more like a kind of misfortune, triggered by Breivik’s pathological madness. For them, any political consideration is prohibited. “Many don’t like it when survivors ask questions. For example, to what extent the way some politicians or the media have discussed migrants or Muslims in Norway has encouraged Breivik. And our party is now being accused of drawing the Utøya card with the candidacy of survivors in order to come back to power. “
Survivors of the Utøya attack received threats and abuse
The writer Erika Fatland has to do a few weeks before the anniversary on the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen. Ten years ago she was a renowned expert on terrorism and known for the minutes of the victims of the hostage drama in Beslan, southern Russia, published in a book; Chechen terrorists murdered hundreds of school children at the time. Shortly after Breivik’s attack, Fatland managed to collect testimonies from survivors and bereaved families and to write a more than 500-page report about it. In 2012, her book “The Days After” troubled a nation that had to endure the face of the murderer in the news every day during the trial from April to August 2012. Some of Fatland’s former interviewees have also received threats and abuse on social networks. “You then read something like: It’s a shame Breivik forgot you,” says Fatland.
The brutalization of the language frightens them, but the hardened fronts in the discussion about the attacks of July 22, 2011 do not surprise them. After an event that affects everyone, people first gathered together and laid flowers. “Then comes the anger and the search for scapegoats,” says Fatland. For many, these seem to be the very ones who, through their survival, will always remember the attack and the destroyed image of a healthy Norway.
Perhaps the dimension of what has been experienced is overwhelming even in a small country, in which trust in one another formed the basis for coexistence long before the raw materials boom and the economic miracle after the Second World War. The perpetrator was an inconspicuous man. The security authorities focused on the Islamist danger did not check him when they learned before the attack that Breivik had bought almost a ton of explosive artificial fertilizer – he lived on a farm. The authorities and the Stoltenberg government have at least admitted their innocence and their mistakes, says Fatland. The country has only become safer to a certain extent. People stuck to their idea of an open society, and bag checks when entering public buildings do not go well with this idea. Fatland can understand the attitude. Because Norway was and is, despite all digital hate orgies, no country with a violent right-wing scene of importance. And yet the attacks happened here. All it took was one perpetrator who had no security agency on their radar. “It’s also pretty difficult to protect yourself from someone like Breivik. This can happen anywhere, ”says Fatland. She never wrote a line about terrorism again. Today she publishes travel books.
