But Marcel did. "I just acted," he says. He saw more and more people jumping into the water from the rocks on the shore and looked through a telescope at the island. Suddenly, he saw the attacker, squatting on a rock with his weapon raised. Eyewitnesses later said that he also shot at those who had already managed to jump into the water.
"There were people swimming everywhere in the water," Marcel says. "I threw them lifejackets and pulled those into the boat who were having the most trouble. Everyone was screaming, but they were also helping each other." They screamed, they cried, but they also hugged each other for courage. "It was unbelievable to see how strong they were," Marcel says.
The 32-year-old took his boat out into the water again and again, collecting more people and bringing them back to the jetty. There, additional helpers were waiting, and several other campers with their boats were also pulling teenagers out of the water. Marcel guesses that he alone was able to bring 20 of them to the shore, he doesn't know exactly how many anymore.
'Goes Without Saying'
Some of the teenagers seemed not to want to be saved by the campers from the other shore. They screamed "don't come too close" or "do you want to kill us?" The reason only came to light the next day. "The attacker was so cynical that he called out to the young people and promised that he would save them," a Norwegian man, who had likewise pulled people out of the water, says.
Psychologists who arrived at the campground after the massacre ended expressed amazement at how well organized the campers were. When the shooting started, many of them put their small children in their cars so that they wouldn't realize what was going on. One man drove many of the freezing teenagers to the campground office to warm up.
In total, the campers at Utvika managed to pull 150 people out of the water. "Still, many of them feel guilty," says psychiatrist Kirsti Oscarson. "The think only of the people they had to leave behind because they didn't fit in the boat and not about the ones whose lives they saved." Her job now is to ensure them that their thoughts in such a situation are completely normal, Oscarson says.