Antisemitism Monitor | Week of August 28, 2023

Luc Bernard, 37, has been designing and creating video games for over a decade. His most recent creation, “Voices of the Forgotten,” is a virtual Holocaust museum available only to players of Fortnite, a popular online combat-themed game. He says it was inspired by the fact that only 20 percent of Americans have ever visited a Holocaust museum.

However, soon after the virtual museum was approved by Fortnite’s parent company, Epic Games, the well-known Holocaust denier and antisemite Nick Fuentes incited his followers against Bernard, who began receiving a flood of threatening messages on X (the social media app formerly known as Twitter). These included comments like “Jews will never let you forget a fake event,” “Where’s the train with you on it” and references to aliens, Adolf Hitler and gas chambers. 

Bernard’s motivation for the game and the virtual museum was educational. He saw that Fortnite was a popular platform that millions of young people were using consistently, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He recognized that a video game like Fortnite could be a vehicle for sharing Holocaust education in a way that might get younger people to pay attention to the facts. Away from a school or physical museum, a virtual museum has the potential to bring the game’s users into an educational experience without their realizing it. Bernard wrote on X, “The entire goal is to make Holocaust education accessible to everyone for free and completely transform the space for the future.” Bernard’s previous project, The Light in the Darkness, was a game in which the player controls a French Jewish family trying to flee Nazi Europe. Bernard—whom Moment’s Andrew Michaels recently interviewed—designed the game in such a way that the user will always lose, connecting this to Holocaust victims’ total lack of agency. “I didn’t want to make it seem like people in the Holocaust had a choice,” Bernard told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He hopes that this aspect of the game and the new Fortnite museum steer players towards the truth about the Holocaust and away from the voices of deniers like Fuentes.