THE MOMENT that Nereo Ferlat believed his life was about to be snuffed out, it was to Padre Pio that he offered a prayer. Padre Pio was a Cappuchin priest who bore the five wounds of the crucifixion in his hands, feet and side and many still make the pilgrimage to the Foggia monastery where he died 36 years ago. Ferlat was a 33-year-old Turin banker and had never been to a Juventus away game until 20 years ago. He and his friend had agreed that if their team reached the European Cup final, they would go. And it was to the infamous section Z of the Heysel Stadium that they went.
Ferlat remembers every second of the horror of section Z and that is because his nightmares were so bad that he found writing them down was the only way of coping. “It was my misfortune to be standing near the wall that collapsed,” he says. “I was being so badly crushed I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was dying. In my head I started saying my goodbyes. Goodbye to my parents, to my wife and my daughter. In moments like that, you do anything to save yourself. In my moment, I found myself praying to Padre Pio.”
It was at that point that Ferlat felt the squeeze around him push him upwards and force him on to the shoulders of those around him. He finds it hard physically to recount the next bit: the bit when he had to scramble for his life across the heads and shoulders of people who he knew were dying. “I was terrified that I would fall through a gap and land in among them again,” he says. “But I trampled over bodies until a Red Cross person helped me.”
It was these recollections that burnt through the nights thereafter. “I couldn’t sleep,” he recalls. “For ten nights I was awake throughout, hearing the screams of all the people. So I decided to write it down and I would write all night until finally the sound of the screaming began to calm.”
Within a month, Ferlat had produced his book, L’Ultima Curva, which translates directly as The Final Terrace but, applied here, carries an apocalyptic subtext. The book was his balm, the writing his catharsis, but he felt an integral connection to others from section Z and, the next autumn, when he heard that another survivor, Otello Lorentini, was organising a gathering, he got in touch and asked to attend. Lorentini welcomed him. His impromptu organisation, however, was not for survivors but for families of the bereaved. Lorentini had been in section Z, too, with his son, Roberto, a doctor, who had been in the process of giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to another fan when more bodies fell upon them. Neither would make it.
“At the meeting, Lorentini explained that we had to stick together to get justice,” Ferlat recalls. “The overriding emotion was no longer grief but people attempting to get some kind of justice and know the truth.”
Within six months, this group of the bereaved were already sensing what, 20 years on, would become accepted fact: that no one took responsibility for Heysel — more disgracefully, that no one really wanted to know. Italian politicians went quiet. It was 40 days after the game that the Prime Minister, Ciriaco De Mita, admitted that he had been in the stadium, but only after Tutto-sport, the Italian daily sports paper, had published a photograph proving as much. Before then: silence.
Lorentini’s group became known as the Association of Families of Heysel. Ferlat found within it that his own experiences — the inadequate stadium, the inadequate policing, the non-checking of tickets — were mirrored by everyone else. The night in Brussels, West German television broadcasters had the sensitivity to pull the plug on the transmission. A news reporter on American TV described the scene as being “like a sickening sight from the Middle Ages”. Yet the players played on. When Ferlat left the stadium that night, there was a space on his bus where one of the dead had sat, and yet, inside, the Juve players had been celebrating their 1-0 win as if it was a genuine triumph.
Ferlat has his own personal testimony of how taboo Heysel had become. His book sold fast, 1,500 copies went immediately, but then sales stopped as shops could not get copies. Tutto-sport wrote an article about its mysterious disappearance. “Somehow a spanner got in the works,” Ferlat says conspiratorially.
The link to another book, 20 years on, provides a similar conclusion. This is The Truths about Heysel by Francesco Caremani, a journalist from Arrezzo, who had intended to be at Heysel that day but was grounded by his father because of his bad schoolwork. “My book brings to the surface what, people have tried to hide,” Caremani says. “The behaviour of the hooligans, of Liverpool players, Juve, Uefa and the sporting authorities of Belgium are all to blame. Uefa, Liverpool and Juve will do as little as possible to remember the dead of Heysel, just as they have done for the past 20 years.”
BRUSSELS, MARCH 20, 2005. LORENTINI has not seen a football match since the last time he was in Heysel. Not even on television. That has been one of his ways of coping. On March 20, however, he returned for the first time to the scene of his son’s death. Heysel has changed completely: knocked down, rebuilt and renamed. Only a single plaque recalls the most unforgettable result to have been played out here. “It was a fine day,” Lorentini says of his return visit. “But we were only allowed in between 10am and midday. I didn’t recognise anything there but the emotion was just as strong as if it had been the same old stadium.” Lorentini had been taken back to Heysel as one of the subjects of an Italian documentary. He sees it as his duty to continue to bring awareness about what happened. With him went his two grandsons, Andrea and Stefano, Roberto ’s boys, who were 3 and 1 respectively when the father they cannot remember left home for the last time.
”I know my father through the stories of my family,” Andrea says. “Stefano and I have been told before about the day he died and what happened to him, but going into the stadium and having my grandfather explain it again, that was very sad to listen to indeed.”
Andrea’s response to Heysel has been diametrically opposed to his grandfather’s. While Otello will not touch football, Andrea is a keen Inter Milan fan, has immersed himself in sport and has a burning desire to be a sports writer. “That’s all I have ever wanted to do,” he says. “Sport is about life, it is not about death. It can be beautiful, it doesn’t represent the dead of Heysel. That is what I want to transmit.”
For Otello, sport is still about compensation, justice, truth — ideals that he has been fighting for now for nearly 20 years. The most he managed to achieve for his impromptu organisation was a payout of £2,000 each from Uefa insurance. The Association later devolved into the Committee Against Violence in Sport and has been active in many areas.
His ultimate aim, however, is an ambitious one. Because he does not recognise this European Cup quarter-final, he wants a third game to be played between the teams, a friendly played in the memory of the 39 dead, and he has written to the clubs, Uefa, the EU and the Italian government stating that this is the only way “to end 20 years of tears”.
He may, instead, have to make do with a new monument to be unveiled at the King Baudouin Stadium — the new Heysel — on May 29. This is a 60-metre square sundial sculpture that incorporates a light for each of the 39 dead and an engraving of the words of the WH Auden poem Funeral Blues. “Finally,” Lorentini says, but he has seen the monument and says it is fitting. “Something very beautiful,” he says.
This, maybe, will help him find some kind of peace. In his own search for closure, Ferlat finally decided to make a pilgrimage to the Foggia monastery of Padre Pio. Seeing Liverpool and Juventus fulfil the forthcoming fixture appropriately would be a further step. “I want this to be a game for peace,” he says. “Otherwise nobody will be able to sleep.”
