Creator of ‘Virtual’ Holocaust Museum Faces Torrent of Antisemitic Abuse From Neo-Nazis, Fans of Nick Fuentes
The creator of the first video game centered on the Holocaust has received death threats and a torrent of antisemitic abuse online from supporters of white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for designing a virtual Holocaust museum that will be showcased inside the popular video game Fortnite, which boasts over 70 million players a month.
French-Jewish video game creator and designer Luc Bernard, 37, told The Algemeiner he hopes his designs will help “stop the rise of Nazism and antisemitism in the US and worldwide.”
“I will not let happen to the US what happened to Europe,” he added. “My work isn’t really based on who I am as a [Jewish] person. But really it’s stop the rise of Nazism and antisemitism now. We can no longer count on politicians and people in power to stop the rise of Nazism in the USA.”
In Fortnite‘s Voices of the Forgotten Museum, which Bernard co-created with a colleague, players can walk the halls of the building and read plaques describing the genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany, resistance fighters and Holocaust heroes, whose photos are also on display. One wall inside the museum focuses on Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian diplomat who issued thousands of passports to Jews trying to escape France. Another highlights Marianne Cohn, a German-born Jewish French resistance fighter who smuggled Jewish children out of France starting in 1942. She was killed by the Gestapo two years later.
Fortnite users will not be able to play inside the museum and emotes — dance moves or other actions that characters can perform — will be automatically disabled.
“I focused on exhibits of things which I believe should be told: Sephardic Jews, members of the resistance who fought back, and LGBTQ Jews that have been erased from history for too long by conservative people in power,” Bernard, who is based in Los Angeles, explained about his designs for the museum. “I focus on the stories of the victims mostly, because everyone forgets about them and just reduces them to numbers and not who they were.”
Bernard’s virtual Holocaust museum will have a massive potential reach since Fortnite‘s publisher Epic Games revealed in March that the video game has 70 million monthly active users. His museum was approved by Epic, but Bernard declined to share details about the game’s release date and the name of the museum’s co-creator because of the abuse he has been subject to, fueled by Fuentes.
“I have to wait until the Nazis calm down a bit,” he said.
A Torrent of Abuse
Fuentes — who was first banned from X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2021 and again in January of this year after his account was reinstated — first sent a message to his 54,000 Telegram chat subscribers with a screenshot from an interview Bernard did with the British newspaper The Times in March, in which he talked about his depression and how Fuentes has negatively influenced gamers.
He then targeted Bernard on X under the account @heyapple008 and called the Voices of the Forgotten Museum “ridiculously stupid.” His supporters then rallied against Bernard and began sending him antisemitic messages promoting Jewish stereotypes and also death threats. One such tweet was a video clip that showed a Photoshopped image of Bernard aboard a train heading to the Auschwitz concentration camp, which Fuentes retweeted. Since Fuentes drew attention to Bernard’s account, his followers have been continuing to harass the video game designer on X.
Bernard eventually managed to get Fuentes’ account on X suspended earlier this week. Fuentes responded in a video message saying, “The Jews have taken another Twitter account from me … the apple account, the apple account is finished,” which is a reference to the name of the account. When Bernard posted the clip on Wednesday on X, antisemitic messages flooded the comments section.
Some of the messages he received said “you just created 100 more antisemites, “a train is waiting for you,” “u are on the wrong side of history” and called Jews “are the scum of the earth … continue to poison the earth with your evil.” Another message showed the emoji of a knife with an Israeli flag next to it and one X user told Bernard: “We still here bro and we are all going to defile the virtual memory of your alleged numerous relatives in your digital creation.”
Bernard’s maternal grandmother was Jewish and with her first husband, and his father, sheltered children in the United Kingdom who came to the country via the Kindertransport, which was a rescue operation during World War II that brought thousands of refugee children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany. Her second husband was Jewish from Germany and all his family members were killed in the Holocaust. Bernard said her grandmother, who raised him, hid her Jewish identity and even changed her name several times.
The Light in the Darkness
Bernard released the first Holocaust-focused video game, The Light in the Darkness, in February. In the game, users can play as members of a working class family of Polish Jews living in France during the Holocaust. Bernard self-funded and directed the project. It can be downloaded for free to make Holocaust education more accessible to the general public, including for teachers who want to implement it in their curriculums.
“With rising antisemitism and Holocaust education stats coming out yearly, I knew I had to change the space. The Light in the Darkness was the start of that,” Bernard told The Algemeiner. “It worked, and nearly 300 000 people have finished it. Zero dollars was spent on marketing.”
Bernard also cited a survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) released earlier this year that revealed 80 percent of Americans have never visited a Holocaust museum.
“It’s not their fault,” he explained, “we only focus on big cities. We put all the money there, on only places where we think matters. I’m here to change things, to bring Holocaust awareness and education to the 80 percent and also worldwide to any country that doesn’t have it.”
The post Creator of ‘Virtual’ Holocaust Museum Faces Torrent of Antisemitic Abuse From Neo-Nazis, Fans of Nick Fuentes first appeared on Algemeiner.com.