Youth camp resumes on isle 4 years after Norway massacre

Hundreds of teenagers arrived Friday at a summer camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya for the first time since a fanatic gunman killed 69 there and shook the small Scandinavian country. The youth wing of Norway’s Labor Party organizes the traditional camp on the small island that it owns, 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest the capital, Oslo. This year, it said, some 1,000 young people have enrolled — a record attendance. Echoes of cheers and shouts of young people playing football rang along the shoreline of the lake, surrounded by wooded hills draped in low-lying clouds, as the ferry docked onto the pier after a short boat ride from the mainland.

It’s good to be home again.

Labor Party youth leader Mani Hussain

The island has been renovated, with several of the traditional wooden rustic buildings refurbished to blot out some of the ugly evidence of the gunman’s destruction. Small signs dot the island with names of victims engraved on steel plates fixed to trees. Messages such as “Step by step we take our island back” and “We take good care of the memories” are written on notes and hang from a tree near the island’s disused main building. A circle of steel, symbolizing eternity, engraved with the name and age of almost all the victims, has been erected on the island as a memorial. For the teenagers, the camp is not only about honoring the past. It’s a chance to debate politics and carry forward the democratic ideals that Breivik sought to destroy.

We have to make new memories.

23-year-old William Reinemo

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