New video game aims to educate people about the Holocaust

A British game developer created a new video game hoping to keep the Holocaust memory alive, as many other video games based on World War II very rarely do.

The 36-year-old creator of the video game "The Light in the Darkness," Luc Bernard, has created the project as a way to be used as an educational tool to teach people about the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis in the 1940s. 

"Young people play games about the Second World War, like Call of Duty, where it is almost never mentioned," Bernard told Agence-France Presse. "It's a bit like denying that it ever existed."

Bernard was inspired by his late grandmother who took part in the Kindertransport scheme, helping bring over 10,000 Jewish children to the UK from Europe before the war broke out.

The player of the game follows the storyline of a European Jewish family who was originally from Poland and living under the Vichy Regime ruling in France, according to FranceInter. The player witnesses husband and wife, Moise and Bluma, and their son Samuel get rounded up in what is known as the Vel d'Hiv Roundup, then transferred to the Pithiviers camp and then deported to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Bernard told the Jewish Chronicle that the game allows the player to interact and make some choices but the story itself won't change the fate of the family.

"I couldn't make a game where you win at the end," he told the Jewish Chronicle. "That wasn't the Shoah, there was no choice."

"During the scene of the roundup, you have to go to the police station, which gives you a list of things to collect, you go back home and take them," Bernard explains how the interactions between the player and the game work.

Perfection on information

Bernard spent a year collecting information for the video game by interviewing Holocaust survivors and looking at archives from the American Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles. "Everything absolutely has to be exact, even if it's an artistic project," he explained to FranceInter. "We checked everything once, twice, three times. That's why it was very hard."

Un créateur de jeux vidéo veut enseigner la #Shoah aux gamers à travers un jeu vidéo, "The Light in the Darkness", où le joueur incarne une famille juive vivant sous le régime de #Vichy pic.twitter.com/XqsbmO5WTZ

— FRANCE 24 Français (@France24_fr) February 28, 2023

Bernard also explains that his video game is not only intended for European or American audiences but rather for African and Asian audiences. In Egypt "90% of young people play video games and the Holocaust isn't taught there."

He also noted that even in the United States, not very many people know what happened in France during World War II. "In the United States, very few people know what happened in France. They think that Germany did everything alone," he told FranceInter.