It was past four-thirty in the morning when Sergeant Müller finally managed to get inside the Kiss nightclub. On the main dance floor, he counted at least 10 bodies, and another eight in the corridor. Despite the severity of the incident, he felt relieved by thinking that, among the 1,100 revelers in attendance that night — the club’s maximum capacity was 769 people — almost all of them escaped unharmed,
“Sergeant, come take a look at this,” said one firefighter, pointing toward the men’s and ladies’ bathrooms, located near the entrance to the club.
Müller followed his colleague and was taken aback by what he saw at the entrance to the restrooms. Trying to protect themselves from the smoke or looking for an exit — as the club had been plunged into darkness during the fire — several young people had huddled together in the bathrooms, the only part of the club in which emergency lights had remained switched on. Several of them had been crushed, all of them had suffocated to death.
Looking upon the pile of corpses, the sergeant felt the strength in his arms dissipate. He realized that men and women had died with their bodies interlaced, crumbled in a heap among the destroyed restrooms in the far-fetched hope of seeking fresh air from the facilities’ tiny windows — which were also sealed shut.
No amount of training could have prepared him to deal with the pain he felt upon seeing himself overwhelmed by the most human of emotions: compassion.
“We didn’t save anyone,” he repeated, in shock. “We didn’t save anyone.”
The above extract, taken from Daniela Arbex’s book “Todo dia a mesma noite” (freely translated as The Same Night Every Day), depicts the moment in which firefighters called out to the infamous Kiss nightclub fire realized they were witnessing one of the biggest tragedies in...
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