I had to learn so much about World War 2 at school I presumed I knew all about it. The Battle of Britain, yep, Dunkirk Spirit, got it. Except, of course, I don't – I don't know all about it. How can I? How can anyone? I know something about it from a British point of view, plus a bit more I've accrued along the way, but this was a world war. There are myriad ways in which myriad communities were, and still are, affected by it, all around the planet. How can I know about all of that? Especially sitting where I'm sitting, in the bounds of Britain. I can't just expect a different perspective to come to me, can I?
But today it did. Today I learnt about a plight I had no idea about until now, and I learnt it from a game. It's a Czech game called Svoboda 1945: Liberation, and it's about Germans living in the borderlands of (then) Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. They had lived there long before, but when the war ended, they were driven from their homes, and brutally so.
Svoboda 1945 brings their story to light, and it does it in a curious way. It's a kind of documentary game, part filmed live action sequences, part historical archive footage, and part graphic novel. You play the role of someone investigating an old schoolhouse in 2001, which belonged to a German family during the war, and somehow it also involves your grandfather. Ostensibly, you are there to decide whether the schoolhouse should be destroyed or preserved, but secretly, you're unearthing something much deeper and darker.
