Survivor Recounts Moment He Caught Fire in Swiss Bar

Noa Bersier went to Le Constellation with friends on a whim. An hour later, he was caught in one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.

When Noa Bersier arrived with several friends at Le Constellation shortly after midnight on Thursday, he found the bar crowded, though not packed, with young people celebrating the new year.

In the basement, people were dancing to pop music. Mr. Bersier, a marketing coordinator for a Swiss hockey team, played billiards with friends. Waiters were hurrying to and fro, he said, some carrying champagne bottles topped with sparkling candles.

Then celebration turned to disaster: Mr. Bersier, 20, noticed the ceiling was on fire. He did not see what caused it, he said, but within minutes the flames had spread across the room.

He grabbed his jacket, he said, and rushed for the only exit he knew — the stairs ascending to the ground floor. So did many others, leading to a scrum of bodies on the stairs, all of them trapped below ground.

Suddenly, he felt a heat wave pulse through him, even though, he said, he did not see any flames near him.

“I saw my hands decomposing,” he said. “I felt like I was on fire. But there was no fire around me.”

Reaching a veranda at the top of the stairs, Mr. Bersier found himself in a melee of flailing and panicking people.

“You see panic in everyone’s eyes. There are screams, we’re burning, we see our skin decomposing,” he said. Finally making it outside, “That’s when I saw my hands, the skin hanging off on all sides,” he said.

“My face was half-burned, I could tell that my hair was burned. I stank of burns.”

Friends drove him to the nearest major hospital, a half-hour away in the city of Sion, he said. Doctors have since told him that he suffered burns on his head, hands, lower back and a leg, though they did not disclose the degree of the burns, he said.

Mr. Bersier spoke by phone from inside the hospital, where officials have barred journalists from entry, and where he is still receiving treatment. He was unlucky to be at the bar in the first place: He had tickets for another club nearby, but left because it had yet to fill up.

As the scale of the disaster becomes clearer, Mr. Bersier said, he feels lucky to have survived.

“I’m really grateful to still be here today,” he said, “compared with others who couldn’t make it.”

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