About the mobile game
Initially Jan de Boer was lucky. He managed to escaped the Nazi raid of Rotterdam in November 1944 in which they rounded up young men and deported them to Germany to perform forced labor. For several weeks he and his family managed to survive the extremely cold winter and food shortages in the Netherlands. But on January 8, 1945, he was finally caught and drafted for labor service. That was when his appalling journey into the unknown that was eventually to take him to Munich began. He recorded his experiences every day in his journal, writing about his fear, his homesickness, and the tough working conditions, but also about his determination never to give up. The visual novel Forced Abroad illustrates what the time spent in the forced labor camp meant for Jan and what he was able to do to survive.
Forced Abroad was developed by Paintbucket Games in collaboration with the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism with llustrations by renowned artist Barbara Yelin. The game is part of the digital project Departure Neuaubing. European Histories of Forced Labor.
