Overview:

The very existence of a tabletop role-playing game that situates its players as the ghosts of Holocaust victims gave rise to this equally unusual academic project. White Wolf’s Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah is a supplement for their (cancelled) Wraith: The Oblivion roleplaying game. Charnel Houses of Europe is a meticulously researched book that tries to do something that may be impossible: deal respectfully with the holocaust while using it as part of a game.

We (Phil Sandifer and Tof Eklund) took this book, wrote a roleplaying scenario using it, and ran the scenario twice, once before and then again at the conference. The players were assigned roles as members of an extended family of victims gathered at the deathbed of their last surviving relative. The game was followed up with a roundtable discussion (see videos) of the experience. Our intention was to probe the limits of what can be considered to be “play” and a “game” as well as explore some of the key issues associated with holocaust literature in the particularly problematic arena of roleplaying. Unlike most RPGs and CRPGs, physical actions were largely unimportant, and emphasis was instead on social and psychological issues. The game revolved around trauma, not only that of the characters’ experiences as Holocaust victims, but also of other traumas and the players’ trauma of roleplaying in this context.

The results were interesting: play consisted of sporadic and often heated discussions between players, with long, uncomfortable silences inbetween. The central trauma, the Holocaust, tended to remain unspoken, something we had not anticipated. Both scenarios ended similarly, but with different affective associations, such that one seemed like “defeat” and the other “victory.” “Play” was at best a cathartic and at worst a miserable experience for players – the scenario defeated most of the usual satisfactions of roleplaying. Paradoxically, players both tended to feel that they had gained an insight into the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors but that the game has failed to produce an authentic experience relative to the Holocaust.

Video 1:

Video 2:

Character Bios given to players shortly before play

Melki Stefanska (Sr.) – the grandfather

You had a good life – prosperity and recognition as a lawyer, a devoted wife, children and a place in the community. Your proudest moment was when your firstborn son Yulek named his youngest son after you. When Melki Jr. took sick and died in 1938 was when it all began to fall apart. The Germans came and the first thing you lost was your law practice, followed quickly by your place in the community and then most of your material possessions. You were marked with a yellow star, driven into a squalid ghetto and treated like vermin. At least you still had your family – your son Yulek, his wife Anja and their two living children, Richlieu and pretty Sonja. And your wayward daughter, Marfa.

But even then it wasn’t enough. All of you were hiding in a tiny attic room when they came. Either you failed to cover your tracks or someone tipped them off, because they found you. An SS man and three judenrat police – Jews who were working with the Nazis to “keep order” in the ghetto. It was too much. You confronted them, or stared to. Someone (the SS man?) must have shot you, because your world went white and hot, then slid sideways and chill. When you woke up, your family was gone. It took you a while to realize you’d been robbed again – you were a dybbuk, a ghost – they’d stolen your death from you.

You haunted the one-room apartment and the tiny attic space you’d hidden in emptily for a while, then found the trail of the SS man. You followed him, looking for the chance to do him mischief. You found you could influence the living, just the tiniest bit, make them twitch or shiver or forget something. Your chance came after the war. You were lucky – the SS man toyed with suicide, but wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t made him. Something cold and hungry inside you stirred pleasurably. You panicked and fled.

When the ghosts of your family found you, you thought you might find peace. You were wrong. They had barely returned when Marfa began accusing you of abusing her. This was an old saw – when you were young and trying to make your way in the world, you’d had a bit of a temper and sometime had vented it at your patient wife and, worse, your children – Yulek and Marfa and Lucia, who was only a baby then. But this was somthing new – Marfa was accusing you of touching her... of abusing her sexually. You denied it angrily, of course. But in that moment, something broke inside you. The desperate focus with which you’d hounded the SS man was gone.

Since then, you’ve vascilated unsteadily between foggy confusion and angry outbursts with few moments of apparent clarity. You’re not sure what you are, what you were or what to do. You’ve followed Yulek’s lead docilely as the family has, one at a time, mourned its dead. Inside, one thought hounds you... you couldn’t have done that to Marfa, could you? Could you... you just can’t seem to remember.

Marfa - the aunt

Your entire life, you’ve been bearing the unbearable. Your childhood was hell. Your father, Melki wasn’t good to any of his family, but Lucia was spared the worst of it by being youngest and having two older siblings to watch out for her. Yulek, your older brother, well he was Melki’s firstborn, heir and, above all, male. You got shouted at, cuffed, and though it took you most of a lifetime to remember, touched in ways no father should touch his daughter. Never able to form close attachments to other men, you neither married nor had children, and stayed close to Yulek and his family.

It was only natural that, when you were forcibly moved into the ghetto, you stayed with them, even when Melki pushed his way into the one room apartment you all had to share. When things got worse, you hid with them in the tiny attic space. And who was it they sent out to get food? Who was disposable enough to be risked? You, of course. You got stopped, of course, and didn’t have the right papers, of course. When suddenly it was death facing you in a SS man’s uniform, all you could see of your family was Melki’s leering face. You weren’t going to die for him. Instead, you told the SS man about the hiding place in the attic. He let you go, promised that you’d be protected if you’d told the truth.

The next day, you were home when the building was searched again. You went with the others into the attic, but they knew where to look now. The SS man and some judenrat police found the hiding place, ordered you all out. Melki then did something stupid, even for him. He confronted the SS man, challenged the Jewish collaborators, and got shot dead for it. That was the first time you realized just what you’d done. Melki was dead, and you’d doomed your own brother, his kind wife, and their little children to death. When the SS man herded you into the cattle car along with the rest, you didn’t even complain. You deseved to die.

One you were in the camp and separated from the others, your survival instincts reasserted themselves. You did what you had to in order to survive. A lot of it was unpleasant. You might have survived, but late in the war you were transfered to another camp. Auschwitz. You never had a chance. No sooner had you arrived than you were hustled off to the “showers.” Your final moments were terrible.

A stranger woke you and introduced you to the horror of existence as one of the ghosts of Auschwitz. You fled into the trackless wastes of the world of the dead, dangerous uncertain places where final oblivion is around every corner. They found you there, Yulek and Anja. The love you felt for both of them at that moment was matched only by the crushing guilt that came with it. You gladly joined them in their search for Richlieu and little Sonja. You were against looking for Melki, but couldn’t argue your point convincingly. Now you are stuck under the same roof with him again, and your suffering continues. Sometimes a small voice in your head suggests that Melki should be dead, really, completely dead, at others you hope he will finally admit to what he did. Only respect for your brother and his family allows you to remain here.

Yulek Stefanska – the father

You are tired. So very tired. You remember feeling strong, capable, alert... but even those memories have grown pale and dry. You did everything you could to protect your family – as you had since you were a boy and had to deflect your father’s wrath away from your mother and sisters. You did everything you knew how, but you didn’t know how bad it would get, didn’t know that they would take everything away from you, didn’t know that guns and uniforms and barbed wire would separate you from them, from little Richlieu with his artist’s hands, from brave little Sonja, from Anja, your love. You didn’t know that without them you would collapse, stop caring, let others steal what little you had, and die in an overcrowded barracks that reeked of urine, feces and disease. Your body was tossed into a mass grave, like so many others.

Then Anja found you. She’d always been your beacon, your guide, and suddenly when you found her, it didn’t matter that you were both dead, both ghosts. You and she set off to find your family, to put it back together. For a while, you thought that things were going to be ok. But everything was wrong, like a funhouse mirror version of your life before the war. Sonja’s youthful beauty is now a ghastly image of suffering, Matra and Melki do nothing but fight, and Richlieu. Poor Richlieu. Even they, your own family, his blood, wanted to give him up as lost. But he is still your son, whatever he has become.

This twisted half-existence is unbearable. It was Anja who first suggested that the entire family could pray for the living that they pass on and not become ghosts. There were so many to say Kaddish for at first, in those years after the war. It has been worthwhile – they have all passed on, even those who took their own lives. Not a one has joined the restless dead. It is almost over. There is only Lucia left. Lucia, your baby sister. She never wed and so, with her, the last of your blood will leave the earth. You can rest then. It will be good to rest, to let it end. You wonder what Anja will do without you.

Anja Stefanska – the mother

It’s all coming apart. You’ve been holding it together for a long time, but this is it. Yulek is the hub of the family – he’s the only one that everyone respects. He holds them together, and you hold him together. But Yulek’s become more and more withdrawn. It wasn’t always like this. When you were young, your parents thought Yulek was a good match for you. And he was, giving you a home, attention and three children. It wasn’t even so much boredom that led you to be unfaithful to him, just the ability of a dashing young man to inspire the heat of passion in you – a heat that never seemed to rise above lukewarm with Yulek.

You ended the affair quickly, after only a few days and even fewer trysts, but that was, to be honest, more out of fear than regret. Then everything changed: Melki Jr. died, and Yulek was heartbroken. For the first time, he turned to you, actually needed you; for the first time you saw a crack in his self-sufficient exterior. It was only then that you actually fell in love with him.

Since then, you’ve been caught in a paradox – everything that has happened since the start of the war has chipped and ground away at Yulek, everything has hurt him, threatened to break him. And with every injury he’s suffered, you’ve only loved him more. You loved him when you found him, his ghost wandering aimlessly, loved him as he bore through everything in order in order to reunite his family, loved him when, against all wisdom and sense, he refused to cast out the monster that used to be Richlieu.

You’ve seen Richlieu at his worst – you saw his eyes light up and saw him turn on Sonja. He would have torn her apart, her, his sister. But you stopped him. Yulek wasn’t there. Marfa, who is like a sister to you, wasn’t there. Melki Sr., who at least wouldn’t have put up with this, wasn’t there. Yulek wasn’t there to see you use a voice more powerful than your own to chasten and command Richlieu, wasn’t there when Richlieu’s face took on a monstrous cast that didn’t even look like Richlieu any more, wasn’t there when Richlieu snarled that he knew your secret, and you’d best beware. Maybe some of your son is still in there, but there’s something else, something that could betray a secret that might destroy Yulek, and thereby the entire family.

Richlieu may not need to so anything. Yulek has become frighteningly withdrawn. He started to become this way after reassembling the family, until you suggested the family could pray for the living – a suggestion that became a prayer for the dead, that they not become ghosts. You don’t know what will happen to Yulek when Lucia dies. You have a feeling he’s about to slip through your hands, like rock ground to sand. And, despite yourself, you love Yulek all the more for it.

Sonja Stefanska – the daughter

You are still young enough. You died, at age 12, the day your camp was liberated. Having survived all else, looking almost dead, a feeble and sexless stretch of skin and bone, you looked at one of the GIs who liberated the camp. He saw something human left in your body, bent down and offered you part of a Hershey bar. Somehow you swallowed it, past cracked and broken lips, down a throat almost blocked by a dry, bloated tongue. In your empty and collapsed stomach, it provoked new agony in a body that you had thought past any further suffering. That chocolate bar killed you. That well-meaning GI killed you. But you are still young enough that you feel grateful to him for trying.

There are moments when you feel older than dust itself. If suffering is the measure of a life, then you lived several in your twelve years. There are moments when you feel that you can’t bear being treated as a child any longer, having added thirty-plus years of death to the paltry dozen you were alive. Nonetheless, you are still young enough to accept that your elders are the way they are, that they may be too old to change. You are just old enough to realize that change may be necessary.

You know that you are dead, as are your father, mother, aunt and grandfather. You know that Richlieu is dead as well, as is your baby brother, Melki Jr. You are still young enough to wonder whether Melki Jr. is a ghost like you are, young enough to see Richlieu’s cruelty as part of his being your older brother, young enough to think, hope, believe that your family can be whole. Young enough to know that you can save Richlieu, fix everything and tie a bow on top. Old enough to know that it isn’t that easy. Lucia, your aunt, is dying. You are still young, but growing old fast.

Works Cited:

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