When Bruno Martins headed through the streets of his Swiss mountain village after midnight on New Year’s Day, he expected to meet old friends celebrating in one of their favorite haunts.
Instead, Mr. Martins, 17, arrived at Le Constellation, a two-story bar popular with the village’s younger residents, to find it in flames, and surrounded by police officers. A scrum of people were trying to escape the blaze, he said. One of his friends was badly burned and sent to hospital. Others were missing, he said.
“It was total panic, people were trampling each other,” Mr. Martins said in an interview. “It’s not real,” he recalled thinking. “It’s a bar we know so well.”
The blaze, which Switzerland’s president called one of the worst disasters in Swiss history, tore through the bar, trapping many of its customers inside, killing around 40 people, and leaving the sleepy resort village of Crans-Montana in a state of shock.
“When we look at the news, we tell ourselves it’s impossible that this could happen to us,” Mr. Martins said as he stood near the remains of the bar on Thursday evening. “It’s a small, tranquil village where everybody knows each other.”
To the teenagers of the village, and those in their early 20s, the disaster felt particularly personal. Le Constellation was their bar, said Sofia Degraye, 22. It was the main place in town where younger residents could find affordable drinks. In quiet times, they would gather there to play billiards, or drink hot chocolate, she said. On busier nights, like New Year’s Eve, it was more like a nightclub.
Unlike other bars in Crans-Montana, Le Constellation usually did not charge an entrance fee, so it attracted a particularly young crowd, Ms. Degraye said.
“It just makes you think: It could have been me,” said Ms. Degraye, who was back in Crans-Montana for the holidays. “You have that guilt. Why did it happen on this night and not the nights that I was there?”
Several hundred mourners, many of them young people, gathered near the cordoned-off bar on Thursday evening. Some were seeking strength and solace in community, others were waiting for news of missing loved ones.
Survivors often had scant information about the victims’ fates. Some of those who were in the bar were disfigured by the fire and hard to identify, and many were taken for treatment in hospitals in other parts of the country.
Johnny Marcelli, 27, a waiter who had seen smoke billowing from the fire-ravaged bar, was hoping for news about a friend who worked there. He had not heard from her, or about her, since the fire.
Lucas Batista, 20, a roofer from the village, had tears in his eyes as he hugged friends at the gathering. He had come to lay flowers for his friend, a 23-year-old barmaid at Le Constellation.
Mr. Batista was at a party at another friend’s house when he heard about the fire, he said. In the morning, he learned that the barmaid had been taken to an intensive care unit. Later, another friend called and told him she had died. “I feel terrible,” Mr. Batista said.
Ms. Degraye said that she had been at the bar two nights earlier, and that one of her closest friends would have been there the night of the blaze, but for a last-minute change of heart.
She was left wondering, she said, how a night that symbolizes a fresh start had devolved into something so tragic. “A celebration of love and light and a new year and new hope and new prospects,” Ms. Degraye said. “All the innocents there, they’re kids, they went to celebrate.”
“All of it gone — and so fast,” she said.
Ségolène Le Stradic is a reporter and researcher covering France.
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