Train to Sachsenhausen

Publisher: Charles Games · Studio: Charles Games, Živá paměť · Creator: Vít Šisler

Anecdote

Designed by Czech studio Charles Games in collaboration with the Foundation for Holocaust Victims and the Terezín National Memorial, Train to Sachsenhausen was released in April 2022 and constitutes the third installment of an informal trilogy dedicated to the memory of Central Europe under Nazi occupation. The title recounts Sonderaktion Prag on 17 November 1939, when the Gestapo arrested twelve hundred Czech students and deported them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in reprisal for protests following the death of student Jan Opletal. The player embodies a young Prague medical student who, on the morning of his arrest, must say goodbye to his family and decide which objects to take onto the train. The narrative structure across several chapters alternates between the last day of freedom in Prague, the thirty-six-hour rail journey and the first weeks in the camp. Director Vít Šisler and historian Vojtěch Blodig of Terezín reconstructed the exact conditions of the transport and detention from the depositions of survivors and the archives of the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg Memorial. The game combines interactive dialogue, rotoscoped animated sequences and more than one hour of documentary footage. A playthrough lasts approximately three hours, and the tone, without ever lapsing into sensationalism, succeeds in conveying the terror of the loss of freedom. The art direction in midnight-blue monochromes and washes evokes drawings made by Czech prisoners preserved at the Memorial. The soundtrack by composer Jakub Kudláč blends cello and deliberate silences. The title is now integrated into the history curriculum of Czech secondary schools. It continues the essential mission of Charles Games in the service of a responsible interactive memory.