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7/22/12 The Anders Behring Breivik Norway Massacre Story: Newsmakers: GQ

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B Y S E AN F L YN N P H O T O G R A P H S B Y M AR C U S B L E AS D AL E

Newsmakers

"Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is."One year ago, a heavily armed man dressed as a police officer appeared on the beach of a youth summer camp in Norway.The kids had no way of knowing he was targeting them for the ills of Europe. Then he started shooting. And shooting. Wherewere the real cops? By the end of the day, seventy-seven people had been killed, the deadliest attack in that country sinceWorld War II. As told by the survivors, these are the beat-by-beat horrors of those terrifying 198 minutes

August 2012

Two hoursafter thebombexplodes inOslo, AdrianPraconhears twosharp bangs,like ahammerstrikingmetal. Thenoises comefrom thelawn downthe hill,between themain whitebuilding andthe jettywhere theferry docks.

The island,namedUtøy a,pokes out ofa glacial lakecalledTy rifjorden

twenty -five miles west of Oslo. It slopes up steeply from the jetty , and Adrian is at the top of the hill, near thecafeteria. He is 21 , though it's only his first y ear at the summer camp for y oung liberals. Already he is charmed, almostsmitten, by the place. This, he thought after he arrived on a clear Norwegian day , really is a piece of heaven on earth.

There are three more bangs. Adrian sees six or seven people—he's not counting—sprinting up the slope toward him."Run," they 're screaming. "He's shooting! Run!"

Another three bangs. But Adrian does not run. He does not recognize the noises as gunfire, and the words beingscreamed are so implausible as to be fantasy . People simply do not shoot one another in Norway . Adrian is not somuch afraid as curious.

He hears more bangs. Two people at the top of the slope fall, abruptly and awkwardly , in midstride. Adrian steps offthe main path, out of the way of the others charging up the hill. But still he does not run. He wonders if he is witnessingan elaborate exercise, if perhaps the organizers are try ing to show hundreds of y oung campers what it would be like tolive in a war zone.



A blond man in a black outfit is climbing the hill. He is nothurry ing. At the top of the hill, he turns left, toward the field wherethe kids have staked their tents. Last night, when low cloudscurtained the moon and stars, those tents glowed red and blue andy ellow from the lamps lit inside, and Adrian marveled at howpretty they were. Like Chinese lanterns, he thought. Now he'sstepping around them, walking backward parallel to and tenmeters off of the path. The man appears to be dressed in a policecommando's uniform: black trousers over what seems to be a blackwet suit, a vest with many stuffed pockets and the word politi onthe right breast, a backpack. He also is carry ing two guns—a riflewith an elaborate sight and a bay onet affixed to the muzzle and, inhis right hand, a pistol. Adrian stoops into a half-crouch. He nowsuspects that he should, in fact, be afraid. But why would apoliceman shoot people? This must be a prank, he tells himself.

He senses other kids around him, also moving in a slow half-crouch. In the middle distance, he sees a girl coming outof the showers. She's wearing gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with auf stenciled on it. Apparently she did nothear the bangs or the screaming while she was in the showers, because she is walking calmly along the path toward theman with the guns.

The distance between them closes. She is only a few feet from the man when she stops, tenses. It looks to Adrian likeshe senses something is wrong, like she wants to run.

The man raises his right hand. He shoots her in the head.

The girl crumples to the ground.

Adrian thinks it looks nothing like it does when someone gets shot in the movies.

The man stands over her, fires once more. Her body jerks.

Adrian runs.

···Seven hours before the shooting begins on 22 July , Gro Harlem Brundtland makes the short ferry crossing from theshore to Utøy a. She was Norway 's first female prime minister and is affectionately known as "the Mother of Norway ."She is scheduled to stay through dinner at the camp.

The Labor Party Y outh League (Arbeidernes Ungdomsfy lking in Norwegian, abbrev iated to AUF) has held a camp onUtøy a every summer for sixty -one y ears. The AUF is by far the largest political y outh organization in Norway , and itsparent party , Labor, has long been the dominant faction in a coalition government. The island itself, which is smalland heart-shaped, was a gift to the AUF from the Oslo and Akershus trade unions in 1950. There are a few buildings—the main white building, the cafeteria, a cherry red schoolhouse, tiny green cabins—and a soccer pitch in a clearing,but most of Utøy a is forest and meadow. A narrow path follows the edge of the island as it rises to cliffs on the westernside, then back down to a rocky beach on the southern tip. It has been known for generations as Kjærlighetsstien, theLovers' Trail.

On Utøy a, Gro will be v isiting her granddaughter, who is in the AUF. One of the Oslo newspapers, Verdens Gang,decides to do a light feature on the occasion, and a reporter and a photographer are dispatched to follow Gro aroundthe island.

Sara Johannessen, the photographer, takes pictures of Gro speaking in the cafeteria and laughing with campers andtouring Utøy a in a pair of borrowed boots. Rain falls, intermittent but hard, and Gro decides to cut short her v isit. Sheleaves after lunch.

The ferry docks on the mainland just before three. On the other side, where Sara has parked her blue Toy ota, shecoaxes Gro and her granddaughter to stand together for a portrait. The picture is static and clumsily posed, like anamateur's snapshot, but Sara is pretty sure they have never before been photographed together in the national media.This is my scoop today, Sara tells herself, this horrible picture.

···



Adrian Pracon stood exposed in the lake when Breivik—screaming"I'm going to kill you all"—leveled a rifleat him.

Sara Johannessen photographed campers on Utøya in the morning and the aftermath of the bombing in oslo.

Thirty -five minutes after Sara takes her horrible picture, awhite Volkswagen panel van slips past a no-entry sign into aplaza below a seventeen-story high-rise. The building isknown as H-Block, and it is part of the government complexin central Oslo. It houses, among other agencies, the primeminister's offices on the top floors.

The driver parks near the main entrance. He lights a fuse thatis connected, in the back of the van, to a mixture of fertilizer,diesel, and aluminum that weighs slightly more than a ton.The driver then walks three blocks north, toward a silver FiatDoblò. A surveillance camera records a grainy image of him:He's wearing body armor and a riot helmet, and he's carry inga pistol.

The fuse has a burn time of slightly more than seven minutes.

···Sara is a block away , and her car is still rolling when shehears a dull thump and low rumble, and she knowssomething terrible has happened because of the concussionthat comes with the sound. Y ou could feel it in yourstomach.

She grabs her cameras from the reporter sitting in thepassenger seat, tells him to park the car, and then runstoward the blast. Building alarms, jostled by that sameconcussion, ring in a shrill chorus, and glass falls from above,shards and panes and whole plates shattering on thepavement. And y et it seems strangely quiet. The normalsounds of the city , the traffic and the trams and the footstepsand conversations that all lay er into a background drone, are

mute. Scraps of paper flutter in the air, dance with thesmoke. The smell reminds her of a freshly struck match,only stronger.

Sara turns the corner toward the side of H-Block wherethe bomb went off. There is a smoking crater where thelobby door used to be. Draperies in red and white flap inglassless windows: They 've nearly all blown out. Smallfires burn. There are bodies, and parts of bodies, on thepavement: Eight people were killed when theVolkswagen exploded, and investigators will find morethan one hundred pieces of the dead scattered in thestreets and even on rooftops. There is a lot of blood.

Sara photographs the wreckage and the wounded andthe rescuers. She photographs a woman who has blondhair and a bloody blue shirt and a foot-long woodenstake poking out of her head. It's part of a window frame from her tenth-floor office, and it stabbed, like a javelin,between her skin and her skull. She is one of nine people badly wounded by the explosion. More than 200 otherssuffer minor injuries.

It all seems unreal, Sara thinks. I keep waiting for someone to yell, "Cut! More blood! More fire!"

···The crew at the late-night café on Utøy a didn't finish cleaning up until almost three in the morning, so Munir Jabersleeps late and misses Gro's speech. He is 21 y ears old and was born and raised in Oslo, where he is the AUF districtsecretary . This is his fourth summer on Utøy a. It's the spirit of the place, Munir say s. Getting to know new people,getting new friends. It's a place for us to really sit down and discuss the future. What do we want Norway, and theworld, to look like when we're adults? What kind of society do we want to live in? Until then, they practice. Every oneon Utøy a is required to contribute to the communal functioning of the camp—hauling trash or organizing social



Munir Jaber

events like Wednesday night's speed-dating or Thursday 's karaoke or, for Munir, flipping burgers in the late-night café.Utøya, for us, it's the place where we live the world we want to see.

After a lecture on student politics, Munir's phone begins to chirp with tweets and texts. There has been an explosion inOslo. He tries to find out more online. The early reports are sketchy . There is brief speculation that a gas main mighthave ruptured. But it becomes clear within a half hour that a bomb has been detonated and that the government blockwas the target.

···At 4:30 P.M. the kids on Utøy a pack into the cafeteria for a meeting. They are wet from the rain, and the air inside ismoist and hot. They know only that there has been an explosion in Oslo, and they are at once frightened and confused.This is little Norway, Adrian Pracon tells himself. Things don't explode.

Monica Bøsei does her best to calm several hundred kids. She is 45y ears old and the island manager, a job she has held for twentyy ears. Every one in the AUF, and probably every one who's everbeen in the AUF, knows who she is; they call her Mother Utøy a,and she is try ing now to be maternal, comforting. She announcesthat the rest of the day 's activ ities have been canceled and that theferry will run only as needed instead of every hour. Also, largescreens will be erected to v iew the prime minister's pressconference. "We are safe," she tells the kids. "We are in the safestplace to be."

Adrian follows her to the main building. He wants to be useful. Heoffers to buy fizzy drinks and snacks for the staff getting the screensset up, and he leaves to go back up the hill to the commissary .

His mother calls as he steps outside. She is in her native Poland,v isiting family . Both of Adrian's parents are from Poland. They fled

during the crackdown on the Solidarity movement, afraid they would be arrested with the other leftists. His parentsare one reason Adrian is involved with the AUF, which is pro-immigrant. My parents did good. They had a futurehere, and I have a good future. Why kick them out?

Adrian lights a cigarette on the lawn. His mother has seen the news about the bombing in Oslo, which is being telev isedacross the planet. She wants her boy to go home.

"No, I'm not going to go home," he tells her. "We're in the safest place in Norway ."

···



Two of Freddy Lie's three daughters are on Utøy a. Cathrine, who is 17 , is there for the second time, and Elisabeth, whois a y ear y ounger, is at her first island camp. Sometimes Freddy thinks his girls joined the AUF just so they could go toUtøy a, but that's not completely true: Elisabeth believes she can change the world. She wants to help people, andespecially she wants to help animals. Oh, yes, the animals. Very important. She would say, "The fur, it stays on theanimals." She is also a number-one picker, a top recruiter, for the AUF in the østfold southern district.

Freddy 's girls are worried about him. He drives a dump truck in Oslo Monday through Thursday , but he's added a fewFriday shifts lately . Cathrine and Elisabeth don't know if he's in the capital when the bomb explodes. They call hismobile. Freddy alway s answers. If they call me one hundred times, ninety-nine I take it. Freddy is at home, in Halden,a border town south of Oslo, but he's left his phone in the car. He misses the call. On the island, his daughters start topanic. They are certain he has been blown up. By the time Freddy retrieves the mobile, just before five o'clock, there'sa message from his ex-wife. "Call Elisabeth."

He dials her number. She is giddy with relief. Through a window in the cafeteria building, Elisabeth sees Cathrine walkby outside. Cathrine points a thumb up so her little sister can see it, but tentatively , more of a silent question than astatement. Elisabeth smiles, gives her sister a thumbs-up in return. Their father is safe in Halden.

Freddy and Elisabeth talk for sixteen minutes and forty seconds. Elisabeth complains about the rain, teases that shemight want to come home if the sky keeps empty ing on the island. If it's still raining Saturday , Freddy teases back, he'llbring her a surv ival suit, and may be a pair of goggles, too.

He tells her not to worry . He's safe.

···The man who parked the white van at H-Block takes his helmet off and sets it on the passenger seat of the silver Fiat.He has two guns in the car. One is a nine-millimeter semiautomatic Glock pistol, and he's etched mjölnir on the grip.Mjölnir is Thor's hammer. The other gun is a .223-caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle, and he calls that one Gungnir, which isthe spear wielded by the Norse god Odin.

He has named the Fiat Sleipnir—after Odin's eight-legged horse—but he's stuck in traffic. The drive should take lessthan forty minutes on clear roads. But because he's blown up central Oslo, the city is evacuating and the roads arejammed. He has not factored panic and chaos into his plan.

The landing for the ferry to Utøy a is at the bottom of a trail from a two-lane road that runs by the shore. The man pullsoff the road at about four twenty but does not drive down the trail. He knows the ferry , an old military landing craft



Elisabeth Lie

called M. S. Thorbjørn, leaves on the hour, and he believes waitingwith the captain for forty minutes is too much time for too manyquestions.

As five o'clock approaches, he shows his ID—his picture above theword politi and below the badge number L109—to the ferrycaptain. The man explains that he has been sent to make sure theisland is secure. The captain helps the man lug a heavy case onboard the Thorbjørn.

On Utøy a, the man is met on the lawn by Monica Bøsei and TrondBerntsen, an off--duty policeman volunteering as the island'ssecurity guard. Trond wonders why no one from the police hascontacted the island. Trond asks if the man knows certain otherofficers. It does not appear that he does.

The man suggests they all go up to the white building, where he canmore fully explain. Trond and Monica turn, walk across the lawn.

The man shoots Trond in the back and the head, five rounds in all.He shoots Monica once in the back and twice in the head.

At the top of the hill, near the cafeteria, Adrian hears sharp bangs.Like a hammer, he thinks, striking a piece of metal.

Munir stay s in the cafeteria building after the meeting about the bombing ends. He is hugging a friend when he hears aseries of pops. They sound like firecrackers or balloons, and Munir is annoy ed. Who would do such a childish thing ata moment like this?

Then people crash through the doors, panic on their faces, screaming for every one to run. Munir y ells for the kids toget out, to keep low, stay beneath the windows. Every one drops, and the floor is covered with crouching bodies, like aknee-deep pond rippling toward the back exit. One head rises. "Wait," a voice say s. "What are we running from?"

Munir realizes he doesn't know. He walks to the door and peeks out onto the flat clearing. There's a girl on the ground.She's not moving, and blood is leaking from her head. He can't decide if it's real. He backs into the building. Through awindow, he sees a man in a black costume, holding a gun. Wow, Munir thinks. How fake is that uniform?

Another pop. The gun seems real, and even if it's not, Munir is worried that campers will trample each other in theirpanic. He tries to bring some order to the stampede.

The shooting is closing in. Munir can hear shots near the windows, the door, then inside. There are so many bangs. Theman shoots a boy eight times, another five times. He kills five girls with eighteen bullets. Then he moves to the nextroom. He kills five more there.

Some of the kids, they don't even move, as if they 're paraly zed. But most of them run. Munir sprints out the door whilethe man is still killing people in the building. He heads toward the soccer pitch and then bey ond, where Utøy a slopesdown to an open rocky beach called Bolshev ik Bay .

The ground is soaked with rain, and Munir slips, falls, gets back on his feet. There are others with him, but his v isionnarrows to the beach. He realizes there is no place to hide at Bolshev ik Bay . Swim, swim, swim, he tells himself, youcan't hide here. He kicks off his shoes, strips off his shirt.

But he does not swim. The rain is cold on his skin, the lake water colder on his feet. He is a district secretary , and kidsfrom his district have been left behind. He feels responsible for them. With three friends, he edges west along thewater, takes cover behind the first big rocks rising from Ty rifjorden. The pops and bangs come closer, and he judgesthe position of the shooter by the sound: approaching Bolshev ik Bay , now at the top of the beach, then moving fartherwest, toward the Lovers' Trail.

Munir and his three friends break for the cafeteria building. He is the fourth in line, legs churning. The shooter seesthem. Bullets spit dirt and mud from the ground. Munir nears the clearing where he stumbled on the way down. Hefalls again. One of his friends turns but does not stop. "Munir," his friend screams, "if y ou want to live, get up and run."

···Freddy 's phone rings at five twenty -five. It's Elisabeth, and she's screaming. She forms no words that Freddy can



Freddy Lie

understand, and if there is noise in the background, he does not hear it. I don't know. The brain, it locks up. All I hearis my daughter screaming. He does not know why she is screaming, does not know what has happened in the tenminutes since Elisabeth joked about the rain.

Freddy fears she has been raped.

His friend Anita Eggesv ik is with him. She also has a daughter on the island, Marthe, who is Elisabeth's close friend.Anita calls her while Elisabeth screams in the background. "Y ou must help Elisabeth," she tells Marthe. "Run toElisabeth."

Marthe tells her mother, "There is a policeman on the island shooting people."

Elisabeth is crouched against a wall, holding her phone to her right ear. Marthe tells her, "Come, we must run." ButElisabeth doesn't move. She stay s there, ducked down against a wall.

Freddy hears his daughter scream for two minutes and seven seconds. And then the man in the police costume shootsher in the left temple. The bullet goes out the right side of her head and destroy s her phone. Then the man shoots hertwice more.

On Freddy 's end, the line goes dead.

···There are clothes scattered on the rocks at South Point, whereUtøy a edges into Ty rifjorden. Campers have already strippeddown and started to swim away . After Adrian saw the man kill thegirl in the gray sweats, he thought only , Get to the water. But nowhe stops, hesitates. He knows he's going to swim, but he doesn'twant to ruin his phone. He takes it out of his pocket and wraps it ina sweatshirt on the ground. He stops again. He's going to want tobuy some smokes when this is over, so he takes out his wallet,wraps it with his phone. Then he steps into the water.

Ty rifjorden is stinging cold. Adrian swims ten meters, then thirty .He's wearing boots, green pants, and a T-shirt, and soon he feelsthe lake pulling him under. He's going to drown, and he wonders ifhe's going to drown for some stupid exercise, for a prank. That's alousy reason to die.

Adrian starts to swim back to the island. But the water is stillsucking him down. He sinks, kicking and thrashing. His toe scrapesa rock, settles on it. He can stretch, tip his head back, get his faceout of the water. He makes a slow, floating leap toward Utøy a,lands on another rock, then another. Eventually he can standproperly , and then he can walk. The water is up to his chest, thenhis navel, his waist, his knees.

The man with the guns is standing in the trees above South Point.He's pointing his rifle toward a knot of kids farther out in the lake.Plumes of water spray up around them, timed to the bangs fromthe shore. Adrian decides the bullets are real.

Adrian does not move. He is standing knee-deep in the lake,completely exposed. The others in the water are off to his right,may be far enough that Adrian is out of the man's peripheral v ision.

He believes he might be inv isible if he stands completely still. He hears the man with the guns y ell, "I'm going to killy ou all." Adrian is close enough to see his face, which turns bright red. "Y ou're all going to die!"

Then the long gun is pointed at him. Adrian sputters, "No, don't shoot," but the words come from his throat in amuffled splatter of water and air. He imagines his grave, his parents standing over it, his Australian shepherds, Mikeand Bella, pawing the ground. He thinks, This is a shitty way to die.

The man stares at Adrian through the gunsight, as if he's deliberating. He does not say any thing. Adrian does not sayany thing. Seconds pass, slowly . Then, abruptly , the man lowers the gun and steps away behind the trees. Adrianwonders if the rifle jammed. But then he hears two more pops in the distance, probably near the schoolhouse.



The police emergency lines in the North Buskerud district start ringing just before 5:30 p.m. on 22 July . There areonly four officers on duty in the entire district, which is headquartered ten miles north of Utøy a in the little city ofHønefoss, and the calls come faster than the operator can answer. The senior officer, a sergeant named Håkon Hval,has been watching news of the Oslo bombing and waiting for his shift to end. He picks up a line. "There's a guy in apolice uniform," a hy sterical voice tells him, "walking around Utøy a shooting people."

Håkon does not believe this. He has worked in North Buskerud for eight y ears, and he has never been to Utøy a,because there's never been any need. Also, police in Norway do not shoot people. This is a sick joke, he thinks. But thephones keep ringing. Phones are ringing in South Buskerud and Oslo, too. He realizes, very quickly , that this is not ajoke.

Already , commandos are racing from Oslo. Håkon sends two of his officers to the ferry landing, and he heads behindthe station with another man to hitch the red police boat to the back of a Volvo.

···Hege Dalen and her fiancée, Toril Hansen, are preparing to celebrate at their camp on the eastern shore of Ty rifjorden,in a plot by the road where they 've parked an RV and, attached to it, erected a sitting room under an awning. This istheir second summer at Utv ika, and 22 July is Toril's daughter's tenth birthday . They 're planning a party .

The rain keeps the women and the girl inside the enclosure. The telev ision is on, and they are watching the reportsfrom Oslo. And then they hear noises from Utøy a, which is not unusual. Sounds carry across the water.

The noise that Hege hears, that every one at Utv ika hears, is a series of staccato cracks. Is that fireworks? she thinks.Y es, she believes it is, and she is annoy ed. Don't they know what is happening in Oslo?

The fireworks keep popping, the rain keeps falling, the telev ision glows. Hege hears engines, and tires on the dirt road.Through the clear v iny l, she sees a black SUV leading a convoy toward the jetty . She recognizes them as Deltas,Norway 's elite police unit. Then she watches as the convoy spins around, turns back up the path, and speeds out ofUtv ika.

She finds this odd. Hege and Toril and other campers walk to the jetty . And then they see the kids, dozens of them,bobbing in the water. They are only heads and flailing arms, scattered like lobster buoy s across the lake. The jetty isthe closest point to Utøy a, but the kids are moving in all directions, like atoms smashed loose. Hege does not knowwhat is happening, but she knows it is not good.

Boats are launched. Toril climbs into one with a man who steers out into the lake to fish kids from the water. Hegestay s at the jetty , waiting for people to come ashore. Within minutes, she helps two girls, wet and shivering, onto thejetty . "A policeman is shooting," they tell her. She begins to walk them up the path to the café at the top of the camp,then detours to her trailer to retrieve her cell phone. One of the girls spoke to her mother less than an hour before andtold her she was safe on Utøy a. She needs to call her back.

Boats bring more campers, dozens, then hundreds. The people at Utv ika gather blankets for wet surv ivors. Hege losestrack of how many kids borrow her phone. One is a girl, may be 18 y ears old, with long black hair. She is nearlyhy sterical, and she wraps herself around Hege. She refuses to go to the café, refuses to leave the jetty , because she lefther brother on the island and she won't leave until she finds him. She uses Hege's phone to call her brother, over andover, but he does not answer, and Hege does not leave her.

···Håkon pilots the red boat through a corrugated-metal tunnel in the middle of a causeway . He's steering south, towardUtøy a's ferry landing, but when the boat emerges from the tunnel, Håkon sees the black SUVs and the flashing bluelights of the Delta units at the foot of the causeway .

He turns the boat hard, then slows and eases up to the boulders. Eight Delta operatives pile in. Their combined weightpushes the bow down onto the rocks, grounding the boat. Håkon can't get it to move. The police shuffle toward theback. The stern briefly dips and water sloshes over the gunwale, but the front rises clear.

Håkon reverses, turns toward Utøy a, throttles the engine. It runs for a minute, may be two, then quits. Water hasfouled the fuel sy stem. The engine won't restart. Norway 's elite police are stalled and adrift.

···Munir is hiding next to one of the cabins in front of the cafeteria building. Nettles prick and tear at his skin. Raindrops



fall on the leaves and spook him; they sound like footsteps, likesomeone is coming, like he's been discovered.

He moves deeper into the thorns, but slowly , silently , stoppingafter every step to fluff the wet leaves and hide his tracks. At thecorner of the cabin, he turns over a leaf so he can see its dry ,lighter side. He figures out he can use it as a sort of mirror: Hepositions it so the leaf will catch a shadow if any one is sneakingalong the wall toward him.

Munir watches the leaf for a very long time. He can hear thepopping sounds echoing across the island, but they do not seem tocome close. He's freezing, shirtless and shoeless in the rain, andhe's tightening every muscle to keep from shivering, from jostlingthe nettles and the leaves. His teeth are chattering, and the soundis very loud in his head. He sticks his tongue between the molarson his right side, like a baffle. The noise stops, but he tastes blood.He's bitten into his tongue.

A helicopter is thumping overhead. There are more shots. Fromthe water, he hears the engines of small boats. He does not knowhow long he has waited in the nettles, but he decides he has twochoices. He can continue holding out for someone to find him, orhe can get to the water. He calculates his odds, then sticks his headout of the thorns.

He spots a girl hiding nearby . He scuttles over to her, not coveringhis tracks this time but still as silently as possible. The girl isn'tmaking any noise, and Munir whispers for her to keep quiet andstay with him. Together they sneak down to Bolshev ik Bay .

They see bodies on the beach ahead. None are moving. Closer now,and Munir can see blood. He counts five bodies at Bolshev ik Bayand three on the rocks nearby . He recognizes most of them asfriends. But he cannot cry out, and he cannot hesitate. We have tokeep it together, because we don't know where the shooter is, hethinks. But we are broken.

Munir tells the girl to get into the water, to swim away quietly . Shegrabs Munir and pulls him into Ty rifjorden, and they thrash fromthe shore. They are halfway across the lake, aching with cold, whenpolice in a small boat putter up next to them. Munir is wary —theman shooting kids on the island was dressed like a policeman—butwhat choice does he have? He climbs into the boat.

···Adrian collapses on the rocks next to the gray sweatshirt wrapped around his phone and his wallet. Rain is fallingagain, and he's shivering in his wet clothes. He strips off his blue tee, puts on the sweatshirt, and lies with his legs in thewater. For some reason, his legs aren't as cold if he keeps them in the lake.

He doesn't want to call his mother, and he's worried his father's badheart will give out if he calls him. He dials the police but he can'tget through. He logs on to Facebook. "Someone is shooting onUtøy a," he ty pes. "I love y ou all." Then he calls his friend Svein, onthe far shore of Ty rifjorden. "Send help" is the only part of theconversation he'll remember.

Adrian is alone on South Point, and he decides to stay there. Theshooter has already made one pass along this shoreline, alreadymoved on to other targets. Lightning doesn't strike twice, he tellshimself.

His phone rings. It's a reporter from the newspaper in Skien, hishometown, wanting to know what's happening. "I've seen five



Hege Dalenpeople dead," Adrian tells him. "Call the police."

The reporter wants Adrian to send a picture. Adrian say s he'll try ."Don't call any one else," Adrian say s. He's worried a buzzing phone might attract the shooter.

He calls the police again, gets through. The operator tells him officers are on their way , the very best officers. Adrianwants to know if they 're coming in a helicopter, and the operator say s y es. This reassures him.

Then he waits. Across the water, he can see the strobing blue lights of police cars and ambulances. Above him he hearsthe chop of a helicopter, and he watches it hover for a few seconds. They promised me a helicopter, he thinks. Thehelicopter flies away . It makes another pass. It belongs to a news crew.

He hears hushed voices and feet padding from the bottom of the western cliffs. Then he sees kids, may be twenty ofthem, coming around the last rocks before South Point. A girl sees him shivering, drapes a raincoat over hisshoulders, and wraps her arms around him, try ing to keep him warm.

There is talk of swimming away . Adrian say s no, he's talked to the police. "They are coming," he say s. "They said just tostay safe."

Then some of the kids are ducking and juking, peeking over the rise. "Is he coming?" They bob their heads, try ing to seethrough the trees and bushes. "Is he? Oh God, I think he is." The kids are frantic, fear rising in their voices. "He'scoming, y es, fuck, he's coming."

And then the man with the guns is there. Two kids sprint past him, toward the interior of the island. A few more stompinto the water, start to swim. Adrian just lies on the rocks. He's exhausted. He's almost drowned once. He can't swimaway , he can't run.

He pretends he's already dead. And when he makes that decision, it's as if a switch is tripped in his central nervoussy stem. His body stops shaking, his teeth stop chattering, and he is perfectly still. But his heart is pounding. He isstretched out on his side, his left arm splay ed above his head, the rain jacket still covering his right shoulder and partof his face. He pushes down hard against the rocks, tries to subdue his heart. It does not work.

The shooter is near him now, down on South Point. The bangs are impossibly loud. Adrian remains completely still,but he opens his ey es. He sees a girl, stripped to her underwear and knee-deep in the lake, cry ing hy sterically . A holeappears in her back. Then a second one. The girl is still screaming and still stumbling farther into Ty rifjorden, and thenshe goes quiet and tumbles over. Adrian notices the water is red.

He closes his ey es again. More shots, and he feels the deadweight of a body fall across his legs. Don't move. Don'tbreathe.

Beneath the jacket, where his face is hidden, he raises an ey elid enough to see a sliver of rocks. A black boot steps infront of him. Then a second.

Don't shiver. Stay dead.

He feels heat at the back of his head. It's from the muzzle of the Ruger, hot from dozens of bullets already fired throughit. It lingers, the warmth spreading to his neck.

Then there is an incredible noise. Adrian believes his head is exploding. He feels a twitch in his shoulder, like the flickof a finger, but his head feels like it's been torn apart.

And still he does not move.

Adrian waits, then opens his ey es. The shooter is gone. He realizes he has been shot, but the wound does not seemterribly serious. The bullet was surely meant for his head, but the rain jacket obscured the shape of his skull: Theround grazed the back of Adrian's neck and hit his left shoulder. His left ear seems to have taken the worst damage,absorbing the shock wave as it bounced off the rocks. He can't hear out of it.

There are ten kids on South Point. Five are dead; the other five are wounded. One of them, a girl, is in the water,upright but limping. Adrian helps her out of the lake and sees a wound in her right leg. There is no blood, just a holedeep and round as a golf ball. They sit together. The blue lights are still flashing across the water, but the helicopter isgone. Adrian tweets: "Shot on Utøy a. Many dead."

He turns to the girl. "It would be really nice," he say s, "to have a cigarette now."

"Y eah," she say s without looking at him.



Håkon Hval

"Do y ou think the shop is open?"

The girl laughs and Adrian laughs, and then they laugh about their water-wrinkled fingers and the cabaret scheduledfor tomorrow night that probably won't happen, and they keep laughing, because there is nothing else to do untilsomeone finally gets them off Utøy a.

···Two Delta squads land on Utøy a in commandeered civ ilian boats at 6:25 p.m., seventy minutes after the shooterdisembarked from the ferry pretending to be a policeman. Four men go north, where the surv ivors point. For morethan an hour, gunshots have echoed around the island, and so no one is sure where the shooter is, or even if there isonly one. The second team, six officers, move south, toward the schoolhouse.

They find the man in a clearing at 6:35, the Ruger on the ground,the pistol in a holster. He holds his arms out to either side, notstraight up like a cornered criminal but waist-high and palms up,like a saint embracing his flock.

A commando y ells for him to get on the ground. Another tells himto get on his knees.

"What should I do?" the man asks, his voice calm and flat. "Do y ouwant me to get on my knees or lie on the ground?"

The police want him on the ground. And then they are on him,cuffing his hands, one officer's knee in his back.

"Y ou are not my targets," the man tells them. "I consider y oucomrades."

The man has, in fact, already twice offered to give up to police. Thirty -five minutes earlier, at 6 p.m., he dialed 112 andwas routed to North Buskerud. "Y es, hello, my name is Commander Anders Behring Breiv ik of the Norwegian Anti-Communist Resistance Movement," he told an operator. "I'm on Utøy a at the moment. I wish to surrender." Twenty -six minutes later, he rang again. That call went to South Buskerud. "We have just completed an operation on behalf ofthe Knights Templar, Europe, and Norway ," he said. "It is acceptable to surrender to Delta." Both calls were dropped.

He did not, however, stop killing. In a little more than an hour, he shot ninety -nine people, almost all of them morethan once, half at least three times. He killed sixty -seven, the y oungest 14 and the oldest 51 but most of themteenagers. He also killed a 17 -y ear-old boy who, in his terror, fell off the cliff on the west side and fractured his skulland his pelv is and tore his lung and his spleen. The sixty -ninth kill was another 17 -y ear-old boy , who tried to swimfrom South Point. Divers found him at the bottom of the lake.

He had planned to kill every one on the island, to drive them, panicked, into Ty rifjorden to drown—to use the water asa weapon of mass destruction, he would later explain.Also, he wanted to film himself beheading Gro HarlemBrundtland. Still, with the eight dead in Oslo, Anders Behring Breiv ik killed seventy -seven people on 22 July , thebloodiest day in Norway since World War II and the worst mass murder by a lone gunman in modern Western history .

The police have never heard of Breiv ik. Nor are they aware of a modern Knights Templar, most likely because there isno such organization. But Breiv ik is very clear in his motives, and he is very open. Earlier that day , before he parkedthe Volkswagen van at H-Block, he e-mailed a document to 8,000 acquaintances and strangers explaining what he wasabout to do and why . It has an ominous title—"2083: A European Declaration of Independence"—and is illustrated atthe end with photos of Breiv ik pointing guns and sheathed in a biohazard suit and sporting regal costumes he has madebefitting a commander. The document (he calls it "the compendium") is 1 ,500 pages long and praises, among others,Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. He claims it required several y ears and almost $400,000 to produce.

It is written, densely and ponderously , with a pretense of scholarship. It is also historically illiterate and thematicallyillogical and can be reduced to an index card: Liberals are willfully enabling radical Muslims to destroy Europeanciv ilization. Therefore, liberals must be killed.

Breiv ik never denies committing the crimes, only that they are, in fact, criminal acts. He believes Islamicization is anexistential threat to the West and that hunting teenagers at a summer camp and blowing up office workers andpedestrians is the brutal y et necessary beginning of a counterrevolution.

He believes history will revere him.



Helle Gannestad

He fears only that he, and thus his ideas, will be found insane.

···Freddy doesn't know where either of his daughters are, and Anita doesn't know where Marthe is. They are in Halden, aborder town in the south of Norway and 110 miles from Utøy a, but Freddy and Anita drive almost all the way to theisland in an hour.

Freddy 's ex-wife calls, tells him she's spoken to Cathrine. "Hi,Mom," she said. "I've been shot in the stomach and the arm, but it'sokay . I'm okay ." His ex-wife gives him a number, and Freddy dialsit. A medic who loaded Cathrine into a helicopter answers. He tellsFreddy that Cathrine has been flown to a hospital. Freddy drivesoff to find his oldest daughter.

Anita stay s at the hotel where surv ivors are taken. At six fifty ,Marthe finally calls. She tells her mother that she ran into thewater when the shooting started and that she stay ed there, neckdeep and bitingly cold, until it stopped. But she was alive anduninjured.

Freddy doesn't find Cathrine until 1 :30 a.m. She's in a hospital bed,unconscious, her chest sutured and bandaged. A machine breathesfor her. She'd sprinted away in a zigzag line and made it to the rocksbelow the Lovers' Trail before the man shot her. One bullet hit the

inside of her upper right arm. A second went through her right shoulder blade and lung and two ribs before exiting herstomach. She found a place to hide, then held a rock against her belly for two hours to stanch the bleeding. She will bein the hospital for nineteen day s before she's well enough to go home.

Freddy doesn't know where Elisabeth is.

···Adrian and the girl with the hole in her thigh are fetched from the island in a little boat by an old man who complainsthat the police didn't give him petrol. Adrian finds this darkly amusing: Every one's got a problem.

Onshore, Adrian insists he isn't badly hurt, but a medic listens to his heart and lungs any way and then raises hisey ebrows. "Wow," he whispers. Adrian is, in fact, badly hurt. The bullet has shattered into dozens of fragments thatcarved a jagged channel through the muscles in his upper arm. It missed the major vessels, but he's still lost a fairamount of blood. Had the shot been a millimeter to the right, Adrian would have probably lost his arm; twocentimeters, he'd probably be dead.

At the hospital that night, a nurse asks him if he needs any thing.

"Is the shop open?" he asks.

"No, it's closed," the nurse say s. "But I can get y ou any thing y ou want."

"What I'd really like is a cigarette."

The nurse goes out into the hallway and bums one. Then she helps Adrian into a wheelchair and pushes him out onto abalcony so he can smoke. It is against the rules, but no one tells him to put it out.

···By Saturday night, those who were on Utøy a are div ided into three categories. The largest is the surv ivors, whichincludes Munir and Adrian and one of Freddy Lie's daughters. The second is the bodies, thirty -seven, that have beenremoved from the island. The smallest is the sons and daughters who haven't come off the island y et. They are almostcertainly dead, and every one knows that.

Elisabeth Lie is not among the first group, nor the second. Still, Freddy hopes. Maybe she is in a tree, he tells himself.Like a bird.

All the bodies are removed by Sunday evening, but Elisabeth's is not autopsied until the following Friday , a week after



Anders Behring Breivik has never denied his crimes.He fears only that he—and thus his ideas—will be found insane.

she was shot twice in the head and then once more because shewas close and not moving and Breiv ik had a lot of bullets.Freddy understands why it took so long to identify her.Seventy-seven people, he thinks. Someone has to be last.

···At the end of the jetty at Utv ika, there is a large rock withwilted flowers at its base and an engraved metal plate attachedto its face that say s 250 surv ivors of the Utøy a massacrereached safety at the camp on 22 July 2011 .

Hege Dalen is now friends with seven of those surv ivors, all ofwhom she came to know in the weeks after. Two of them, infact, planned to rent cabins at Utv ika on the anniversary . "We'llhave a beer," one told her.

She will not share their names. "They have been throughenough," she say s. She tells me about their mothers and fathers, though, who learned their children were alive and safeat Utv ika because of Hege's phone. "For mothers to know someone's taking care of their babies..." She does not finishthe sentence, and she seems about to cry .

Toril made at least four sorties into Ty rifjorden on 22 July to rescue swimmers in a little boat. "And when the boat wasfull," Hege say s, "they had to leave people. Toril say s that was so hard." Later, when the shooting was over, Hege andToril got into their own small boat and motored to the island. They retrieved six kids, but they saw others on the westside, hiding in the rocks. They tried to coax them out, but the kids wouldn't come. Hege and Toril realized they weredead.

Hege is back at Utv ika for a third season, and this particular afternoon belongs to a blue and glorious Saturday at theend of April. But she is there alone, without Toril. She will not say why , exactly , and she also will not tell me how toreach her fiancée. Finding Toril would not be difficult—she was at Breiv ik's trial—but Hege's refusal to help seems morea mournful request than obstruction. "In a way ," she say s, "that day has affected us to where it's part of our problem."

···Sara Johannessen clicks through images until she finds a photo of Gro Harlem Brundtland with AUF kids on Utøy a. Grois wearing borrowed boots, and the girl she borrowed them from is beaming in the foreground. Her name is BanoRashid.

Breiv ik shot her twice in the head on the Lovers' Trail. "She's dead," Sara tells me. She points to a boy in the samepicture. "He's dead." She pauses, seems to count. "Half the people here are dead. He's dead, she's dead, her, her, him,her..."

In the day s after 22 July , Sara photographed flowers, thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, may be millions. Itbegan with roses laid that night outside the Oslo Cathedral, and then more came the next day and the next, and whenthe shops ran out of roses the people brought lilies and orchids and carnations until there were wide seas of blooms atchurches and monuments and the whole city was perfumed by blossoms.

Sara and her boy friend opened their apartment for weeks to any of their friends and colleagues who needed a respite.Many did. They talked and hugged and vented and napped and ate. They bought pizzas from the corner market untilthe stock was depleted, and they drank all of Sara's good wine and the whiskey , too. "It was perfect," Sara say s.

She seems to blush, but only for a moment: "May be I shouldn't say this, but I was glad I was a girl." The men, and theywere mostly men, tried to be stoic. Sara didn't have to pretend. "I could sit on laps," she say s, "and I could cry ."

···Breiv ik's trial begins on Monday , April 16, in a courthouse a block from the high wooden barriers still surrounding thegovernment quarter he blew up, and it will last until June 22. Although Breiv ik pleads not guilty , there are no materialfacts in dispute. On the fourth and fifth day s of the trial, he recounts in detail how he killed seventy -seven people,much as he did last August, when he led investigators around Utøy a to show them where he shot each person.

The main question at the trial is whether Breiv ik was criminally insane on 22 July and, thus, whether he will be lockedup forever with or without compulsory psy chiatric care.



The trial is so long because it is so detailed. On the first Friday in May , a forensic pathologist describes how the bodieson Utøy a were processed and examined. He describes how spiraling bullets disintegrate into tiny pieces as they tearthrough soft tissues. And then he begins listing each person Breiv ik killed with gunshots—how many times each hadbeen shot and where the bullets had entered and whether they died from injuries to the head or the chest or somecombination of the two. This alone takes several day s.

On May 7 , a pathologist points at a mannequin in an Oslo courtroom, showing exactly where each bullet struckElisabeth Lie. Freddy is there, and he knows what the pathologist will say . In the months since 22 July , he has read allthe statements and looked at all the photographs and studied all the reports. "That was a way to prepare to be here," hetells me the next day . "That is a way to surv ive for me. I didn't want to hear it here for the first time."

At a pub across the street from the courthouse, he is seated at a sidewalk table with Anita, drinking beer and hand-rolling cigarettes. He has sad ey es and stubble and a gold hoop in his ear. On his right wrist is a black rubber braceletembossed in white letters with a thought that a y oung woman active in the AUF named Helle Gannestad tweeted eighthours after Breiv ik's arrest. "If one man can cause so much pain," it reads, "imagine how much love we can createtogether." It's become sort of a national sentiment.

Freddy also has a copy of Dagbladet, which in that day 's edition has a story about Elisabeth and Cathrine, and there isa large photograph of both girls spread across a page, their heads tilted together, both of them smiling. Elisabeth'sfamily didn't want her to be remembered as v ictim number nineteen on the seventh page of an indictment.

"Elisabeth," Freddy say s, "she was the perfect one. She was pretty , she had a lot of friends. If one of her friends had aproblem, they came to her."

And Cathrine? She still gets winded climbing stairs, but Freddy say s she's doing better, phy sically . "Cathrine, she say s,‘Why me? Elisabeth was the pretty one. She had all the friends. Why did she die? Why not me?' " Freddy looks away fora moment, then turns back. "What do y ou say to that? Speechless."

He does not hate Anders Breiv ik, though he does not refer to him by name. "That fucking maniac" is what he calls him.May be he would hate him, certainly he would hate him, if he thought about it. But he doesn't. "I don't give a damn," hesay s. "Why should I care? I still have two children. I need to take care of them. To hate him, it takes all y our energy .From day one, he's been a zero to me."

Freddy 's other surv iv ing daughter is Victoria. She was 7 when Elisabeth was murdered and Cathrine was maimed,which means she was too y oung to really understand. But she has questions, and they occur to her at random times,like when she is play ing happily on the floor and then she climbs into her father's lap and weeps and asks whatever it isshe wants to know. Freddy cries with her, and he answers as best he can, and then Victoria is satisfied and goes back toplay ing on the floor while Freddy is still cry ing on the couch. "The children," he say s, "they get an answer, they 're okay .But we can't let go. We can't."

···There are times, still, when Adrian will be in a shop or in a crowd on the street and he will see the long barrel of a gunpointed at his chest. The moment alway s passes, but it's alway s real, and it's alway s terrify ing.

He lives alone in Skien with Mike, one of his Australian shepherds—"the best shrink I could ever have," he tells me oneday in the middle of Breiv ik's trial. He had to give Bella to his father, because two big dogs are too much for him tohandle, and he has to hold Mike's leash in his right hand, because his left arm still doesn't work properly and probablynever will. He's missing some muscle, and there are seventy or so fragments still embedded in his flesh that work theirway up to his skin every now and again. "So there's alway s a reminder," he say s, "that there are pieces of ev il in me."

He smoked a lot over the winter. He got hate mail from right-wingers, and once, down by the water behind the mall, alittle thug told him, "Y ou weren't killed then, but someday I'll make sure y ou are." When he went out, he left notes inhis apartment say ing where he'd gone and who he was meeting in case that person turned out to be a lunatic assassinand the police had to search his apartment for clues. He also wrote a book, with a Norwegian journalist, about hishours on Utøy a. It's called Heart Against Stone, which is a reference to his desperate effort to quiet his pounding heartin the moments before Breiv ik tried to kill him. He often wonders why he is still alive, why the man with the gun didn'tput a bullet in his chest when he had a clear shot, and how he managed to miss the head of a still body at point-blankrange. Adrian decided it was luck, and that perhaps all of life is endless luck.

May be that's true. On the sixth day of his trial, Breiv ik explained exactly why he didn't shoot Adrian when he had hisfirst chance. "I thought," he told the court, "that he looked right-wing."



···Munir Jaber has olive skin and black hair and chocolate ey es. He is the son of immigrants from Eritrea and Morocco,but he is Norwegian by law and birthright and upbringing and culture. He is also one of the people Breiv ik considers anexistential threat and, because Munir is a y oung, liberal political activ ist, a legitimate target. This is something Muniris aware of but does not dwell on, which is also because Munir is y oung and liberal and, as y oung liberals tend to be,optimistic.

"We literally turned our backs on the terrorist the same day , the same hour," he tells me in early May . "We turned ourback to the terrorist and turned toward each other, to taking care of each other."

His phrasing is deliberate, too. " ‘The terrorist,' " he tells me. "Alway s write ‘the terrorist,' not ‘the shooter.' "

Munir has never spoken about his last hours on Utøy a, but he is supposed to testify in three day s, and in the atrium ofthe building where the AUF and the Labor Party are headquartered, he decides it would be good practice to gothrough it all. He is thorough and linear. At the precise moment he describes the sound of gunshots inside thecafeteria building, a waiter drops a tray on the lobby floor. It hits with a sharp, echoing slap. Munir startles, thenlaughs awkwardly .

But he does not really want to talk about Utøy a. He wants to talk politics, how there will alway s be terrorists but theywill never be more than a very few, and the answer, the trick, is to engage such people. "To bring out facts," he say s."To have constructive debates."

"My values have been strengthened," he say s. "I'm more determined to work for the society we believe in, to makeopportunities for people to have possibilities in their lives."

And Munir's ideals extend, in a tangential way , to the terrorist who would have shot him if he'd gotten close, theterrorist who has been granted a ten-week trial that began with six day s of explaining why he killed seventy -sevenpeople. "We have confidence in the sy stem; we have confidence in the trial," Munir say s. "And we believe this personhas to be treated like any other criminal, good or bad. We have to stand for our values. If we don't stand for what webelieve in, we fail."

···The clouds were low and thick over Ty rifjorden one morning in May . A light rain fell, dissipated, then fell again. Utøy a,mist barely lifting above the highest trees, looked from the water much like it did on 22 July . I made a slow looparound it in a rented outboard, starting at the north, Bolshev ik Bay , and puttering counterclockwise toward thewestern cliffs. At the edge of the water, before the cliffs reach their highest point, there is a cinder-block hut called thepump house. From the island, it looks like a good, solid thing to hide behind; from the water, it looks like a trap, a deadend with nowhere left to go but into the open water. Breiv ik killed fourteen kids at the pump house.

The boat rounded South Point and motored toward the jetty . A police officer was standing on the rocks, alone. It wasHåkon Hval, and he was there at that moment by happenstance: He'd brought the national police commissioner and atelev ision crew to the island so they could film part of a documentary .

He did not chase me away —Utøy a is open to the public—but rather helped tie up the boat. I told him why I was there,and he nodded and told me to stay by the water until the TV crew was finished. A cold wind gusted across the lake, andwe stood there in awkward silence, as is often the case when lone police officers encounter unfamiliar reporters.

"If y ou want to know any thing about the island," Håkon said eventually , "now is the time to ask."

Håkon was on the island a few minutes behind the Delta squads. He said the west side was the worst, in terms of thenumber of dead and wounded. But the surv ivors were curiously quiet. "They were more or less paraly zed," he said."They weren't screaming. They were just sitting there."

The rain had been heavy on 22 July , and Ty rifjorden was rising. Some of the dead, the ones closest to the water, had tobe pulled farther up onshore so they wouldn't float away . That was one of the first things Håkon did on Utøy a, movebodies like driftwood.

When the sun went down, Håkon was in a boat not far from shore. Divers were in the lake, searching the depths forbodies that might have been drowned, and Håkon was prov iding security . It was very quiet. Håkon could hear waveslicking at the sides of the boat, and then, from the island, he could hear something else: a chorus of chirping andbuzzing and snippets of pop songs. In the darkness, he saw tiny lights flickering on, then off, then on again, like



TAGSProfiles, Norw ay, New smakers, Longreads

fireflies. There were hundreds of them, scattered along the Lovers' Trail and on the lawn below the cafeteria and in thetent field and where the bodies lay . Mobile phones lighting and ringing and nobody answering.

"There was nothing y ou could do," Håkon said. "Y ou just had to wait until they ran out of electricity ."

Sean Fly nn is a GQ correspondent.

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