Teenage Norway shooting survivors ask ‘why us?’

They wonder how a man can shoot at children indiscriminately:

Norway: The exhausted teenage survivors of the shooting massacre on an idyllic Norwegian island huddled together Saturday, tears streaming down faces marked by shock and incomprehension. Many of those who were brought to the Sundvolden Hotel, just a few miles (kilometres) up the wooded valley from Utoeya Island, after Friday’s killings, have left, avoiding journalists waiting behind a tight police cordon.

Those who remain hug each other and their families, wearing blankets and smoking cigarettes as rescue workers continue the grim task of recovering bodies of those shot while escaping in the waters to the northwest of Oslo.

A visibly shaken Miriam Einangs, 17, said that out of solidarity the adolescents who managed to escape or hide on the island as a killer calmly walked among them shooting had agreed not to tell the worst of what they saw.

Terrible stories

“I have heard stories about people swimming over the lake, people hiding under stones and almost being shot at so there are some terrible stories,” she said.

“We have agreed in our groups that we won’t talk about the most terrible because it goes only in media. It’s too hard. We must remember that we were just 14-18 most of us and this will take a long time to come off.”

At least 85 people died in the massacre of youngsters attending a Labour Party summer camp on Utoeya and seven more were killed in an earlier car bomb explosion which ripped through government buildings in Oslo. While there was no official confirmation of the suspect’s identity, he has been widely named by the local media as Anders Behring Breivik.

Blond-haired Behring Breivik described himself on his Facebook page as ‘conservative’, ‘Christian’ and interested in hunting and computer games like ‘World of Warcraft’ and ‘Modern Warfare 2’, reports said.

A gangly adolescent who declined to give his name said that six of his friends were on the island when the attack happened. He was going to attend, but decided to do his summer job instead.

Red Cross

“Three of my friends are OK. Three are still missing. Everyone here is doing a good job, but I can’t find my friends. I tried to ask the police but they’re always busy,” he said, before being led away by an adult.

“Earlier there were many survivors and people were happy to have survived,” said Jahn Petter Berentsen of the Norwegian Red Cross.

“Now most people are those who have lost some of their closest so its difficult, there’s lots of emotion and we are just here to be a hand to hold.”

The children receive counselling, from the Red Cross, from psychologists, from priests, as the already tight community comes closer together.

“Today they are very quiet and very full of sorrow, yesterday they were in shock,” said Torunn Aschim, a Norwegian Church vicar from the nearby town of Honefoss who is working in shifts with other vicars to comfort the bereaved.

“There were 700 young people here full of shock and they had experienced bad thing and seen many comrades die.”

She said that the children simply do not understand how anyone could commit such violence.

“They ask ‘how can a man do that, come out onto an island and shoot at children and young people, how can you manage that?’ They find it sick. We never know why people do these things but it’s sick and it’s bad.”

“Now I’m going home, I have a sermon tomorrow. I will pray for them, I don’t think I will preach but I will take them with me in prayer.”

AFP