Can a game interest young players in Holocaust history?


The terms “video Game ”and“ Holocaust ”don’t seem to belong in the same sentence, and yet Luke Bernard is working on exactly that. Concerned about the rise of anti-Jewish incidents of hatred in the United States and around the world, and motivated by a desire to bring Holocaust education to a new generation, Bernard embarked on a project he had set aside nearly 10 years ago. “It was completely different then and, thank God, I didn’t finish it,” he confides. The key difference between now and then? The addition of 83-year-old Joan Salter, a researcher appointed to the Order of the British Empire for services to the Holocaust and a Holocaust survivor, as the author of the game.

Bernard, meanwhile, has had an extensive career in gaming since working on the 2009s Sword wars and Pocket God a series directed by Kitten Squad (PETA’s first video game for consoles) and the creation of Paraiso Island, a hurricane relief game for Puerto Rico. His efforts also have a personal side. Bernard’s grandmother cared for children from Kindertransport, Jewish refugee children who had fled Nazi Germany to Britain in the late 1930s. However, Bernard learned about his family’s hidden Jewish roots as a teenager.

Called The light in the dark and takes place in Bernard’s birthplace in France, the game illustrates how a seemingly normal society can quickly turn against the Jews. The characters in the game, a Polish-Jewish family in France, are fictional, but the events are based on things that actually happened, many of them to Salter’s family. “No matter how good a writer I might get, they could never have the same emotion and feeling about the Holocaust compared to someone who actually experienced it – even if she was young, she and her family experienced it. That’s why I think something special happened. “

The game follows the family’s experience on the eve of the Vel d’Hiv rally in Paris in July 1942, when a foreign arrest of foreign Jewish families (including more than 4,000 children) by the French police was ordered by German authorities. They were held in appalling conditions before being taken to internment camps and eventually to camps such as Auschwitz, where they were killed.

For both Salter and Bernard, accuracy and realism were key to everything from dates and places to uniforms. When Bernard sent Salter pictures of some of the work he had previously done, she immediately realized that he was a Nazi collecting children. “And I said no, it wasn’t the Nazis. That was the French police, “Salter said. An important distinction, because the Vichy government gathered the Jews even before the Nazis wanted it. The conversation unfolded from there.

“She’s the biggest critic,” Bernard said. “She’ll notice every detail.” In short, the game will not be released unless Joan approves it.

Salter knew at once that Bernard would be touched by the fact that she had survived the Vel d’Hive. “But, of course, I was a small child,” she says, “while it’s much more important to me that I spent 40 years researching and recording testimonials.”

Bernard hopes that by playing the game and reliving the story, the user will become attached to the characters and have a greater desire to learn about the Holocaust and discrimination against Jews. “You’re trying to create empathy, so it has to be historically correct without hitting people on the head,” Salter said. “You show how complicated it is. As with any drama, you have to empathize with the characters and then slowly see their lives fall apart through their fault.

Bernard, meanwhile, saw a video game industry where the only conversational games with their players about World War II were from the perspective of American soldiers firing on the Nazis, completely ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust. “This may be contradictory, but I believe that pop culture has turned the Nazis into cartoon villains, like the Nazi zombies in Call of Duty and Wolfenstein (which I love). You reduce the real evil of what the Nazis are and what they did … and you gain from Jewish trauma, “Salter added. ”



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