The island is beautiful, situated in Tierra Forden, a lake inside the county of Baskin

It's an incredibly peaceful place where violence is, or at least was, almost completely unheard of.

Yatoya was a little heart-shaped piece of paradise, with freshly mowed lawns at a pleasant,

picturesque campground set amongst dense pine trees and rocky beaches with a small

pier and neat buildings. Back in the 1800s, the island was a croft, a Scottish term for a fence

to enclosed parcel of land, typically for farming, before a politician Jens Broccoli bought it in 1893.

He would use it for four decades as his summer residence until

1933, when it was then purchased by the Trade Union Confederation. And then in 1950, the

Trade Union Confederation gave the island as a gift to Norway's Labor Party, who would begin

holding summer camps for their youth organization, the Workers Youth League, or the AUF. It seemed like the

ideal spot to gather a bunch of teens, and for decades it truly was. After getting their bags

checked for alcohol and drugs, teens would take the old ferry, a former military landing craft,

over to the island and be greeted by cheerful young counselors, many of them teens as well,

who were just a year or two

older than the campers themselves, teens who have been coming to the camp now for several years.

Once on the island, kids might head to listen to a lecture given by some government minister,

or go to a debate, or simply sit around talking about what they wanted the future to look like,

the future of Norway, the future of Europe, the future of the planet, young idealists hungry to make the world a better place. What a beautiful thing. And their time on the island wouldn't only be serious. They were still after all a bunch of kids. That also sing karaoke, go swimming, they play football, hold hands or shyly sneak away for kisses or more for some summer romances.

The older ones, senior leaders in their early 20s looked after the younger ones, some as young as 14.

So, so many wonderful memories built for so, so long.

But on July 22nd, 2011, the utopia this island had

offered kids for over half a century, was shattered and forever stained. The first sign that

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