THROUGH THE DARKEST OF TIMES GAME TV

The sense of desperation has an impact because whether or not you want to admit it, we're living in desperate times. I cried because, as a human being with an awareness of how the past informs the present, Through the Darkest of Times puts all of this in front of you and then dares you to ignore the obvious connections to fascism's 21st century mainstream comeback. A resistance movement that started as an apparent majority dwindled more and more because of how the people in power wielded fear as a weapon. Hitler was popular and a powerful propaganda machine led common citizens to believe that Germany was winning. You might want to believe that everyone has their breaking point where there's no choice left but to resist. Others opted for blind ignorance because it's hard to stand up for what's right in a police state. Some willingly fooled themselves because they were secretly on board already. For any of the resistance efforts, real and fictional, the German public that supported Hitler was conned into believing the rumored atrocities of the Holocaust were just that: A fiction. It was the heavy weight of having taken this long journey filled with grim specifics and seeing how fruitless it all was.Īll of those millions of people still died. It wasn't the loss of my fictional resistance group or even the sentiment expressed in the quote that prompted this sudden outburst of emotion.

The Mannheimer quote appeared last, putting a period on the 'Meier-Zielke-Gruppe' story. Text on the screen told me what happened next to my small squad of resistance fighters. But with a key member arrested by the Gestapo and our morale completely in the toilet, we disbanded and the game ended. In my case, I managed to keep my group together through the late days of the war in 1945. It's a game of strategic decision-making, with a story that's shaped by your choices. Instead, you're asked to lead a German resistance group in the years before and during the war. It's not even focused on the Jewish experience during World War II, not directly. Through the Darkest of Times doesn't dare turn those death camps into a game, thanks be. I tend to frame stories like this against my own deeply personal understanding of World War II. Once you've seen the ovens where Jews were burned, the showers where they were gassed, and the lines of skeletal prisoners standing in front of corpse-filled mass graves as they wait to be executed, it stays with you like emotional scar tissue. The hours I spent in that fluorescent-lit classroom watching archival footage from the Nazi death camps aren't easily forgotten.

THROUGH THE DARKEST OF TIMES GAME TV

Whether it's a movie, TV series, or video game, I tend to frame them against my own deeply personal understanding of the war, which is informed as much by the stories I used to hear from family as it is by my former Hebrew school's Holocaust class. I know I'm not alone when I say this, but I have a strange relationship with World War II stories as an American Jew whose family roots were directly influenced by the Holocaust. But you certainly are responsible for preventing it from happening again.' 'You are not responsible for what happened.

The words come from painter and Holocaust survivor Max Mannheimer, who worked in the aftermath of World War II to educate the public on the horrors wrought by the Third Reich. There's a quote that appeared at the end of my Through the Darkest of Times playthrough and it's worth committing to memory during this divisive moment in history.

Through the darkest of times game