Anne Frank video game seeks to educate youth

BERLIN — An interactive video game will allow users to relive a day in the life of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank.

The focus of the game, simply titled “Anne Frank,” is the day in October 1942 that the teenage Anne wrote in her diary about her fears that a worker was about to discover the family’s hiding place in Amsterdam, German media reported.

German video designer Kira Resari, 25, calls the game an “interactive experience” that was not meant to be “fun.” It is not yet available for sale.

“It’s more like you get carried away, touched, and perhaps moved to tears,” he told a website, adding that he “would not give away the ending.”

“I want to make a contribution toward ensuring that she is never forgotten,” he said.

A spokesman for the Anne Frank Center in Berlin, Scott-Hendryk Dillan, told JTA the center has been aware of the project since March but has not yet evaluated it.

“We are getting in touch with the creator,” he said.

Dillan noted that the website of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam offers a multilingual interactive virtual tour through the house where the Franks were in hiding.

He said it is state of the art, “but not interactive. This Munich game designer is the first to do this.”

Resari said he wanted to contribute to ensuring that the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust never be forgotten.

“Younger generations need access to history on their own wavelength,” he told the Protestant online news portal evangelisch.de.