Out of the fire that claimed over 40 young lives in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve comes a story of heroism and coincidence that allowed an Italian Swiss father to help rescue 10 of the youth trapped inside the underground venue.
In the Swiss town of Crans Montana, sparklers or similar items are believed to have ignited the ceiling of Le Constellation bar where over 150 young adults were celebrating the new year.
Paolo Campolo, 55 anni, è uno degli eroi della tragica notte di Capodanno a Crans-Montana.L'uomo di origini calabresi che ha salvato, insieme ad altri soccorritori, decine di giovani dal fuoco devastante esploso nel bar, ora si trova in un ospedale di S... https://t.co/w2P3WQwMbC
— RaiNews (@RaiNews) January 3, 2026
Paolina Campolo, a student in Geneva who was home with her boyfriend to visit her family, might have been among that crowd, if not for a stopover at the home of her father, Paolo, “to say hello, toast together, and open the panettone.”
Paolina’s boyfriend was waiting for her at Le Constellation, and it was her late arrival that saved both her life, and that of her boyfriend.
“It was our fault she was late: she should have been at that club already at midnight,” Campolo said from his hospital bed according to the Italian outlet Il Messaggero. “Today I can say it without exaggeration: that delay saved her life.”
At about 1:20 a.m., as Paolina was going to meet her boyfriend, she called her father having seen flames rising above the building. Located not far from the upscale bar, Paolo rushed there with his own fire extinguisher.
Searching the exterior, he and a stranger eventually found an exit, “but it was blocked or locked from the inside. I forced my way in, and that’s how I managed to save 10 young people,” said Paolo.
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Some of what he saw through the windows horrified him, but he carried on by constantly imagining that everyone inside was his own child.
“The local solidarity was extraordinary,” he continued in the interview. “The nearby bars reinvented themselves as medical hubs. In particular, the ‘1900,’ a bar next door: They welcomed the injured people into their kitchen, made them sit down, helped them breathe, and prevented them from fainting. Amidst the horror, I will never forget that humanity.”
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