The Doyle Engaging Difference Program - Georgetown University

On a gray December afternoon, a friend from Georgetown and I stopped in a little tabac in the Alsatian countryside to ask for help hailing a cab to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

When we told the customers of the tabac our destination, shock rippled across their faces. “They must not be French,” one of the men sitting at the bar commented wryly. His comment illustrated the French’s hesitance around recognizing the more troubled aspects of their history, including the German occupation during World War II. Especially in Alsace, the region where my home city of Strasbourg was located, which had flipped back and forth between French and German possession over the centuries, this history unearthed still-raw memories of its incorporation into Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944. During this bleak period, Alsatians were forbidden from speaking French and over 130,000 men were unwillingly drafted into the Nazi army.

“We want to learn,” I responded in French. I explained that I had researched Struthof, the only concentration camp on French soil, for an essay at Georgetown, and I was determined to better understand this dark chapter in French history by bearing witness to the suffering of the Holocaust’s victims. The customers’ skeptical expressions softened into understanding. “I’d drive you there if I had a car,” one of them offered. 

Ten minutes later, the shopkeeper’s mother arrived to drive us to the concentration camp.

Just three months before, I would have been too self-conscious of my broken French to ask for the locals’ guidance and would have abandoned my journey to the camp. Yet I gradually embraced making mistakes. I came to recognize that even though my grammar might not be perfect, making an effort to communicate was what mattered.

During my four months in Strasbourg this fall, I gained the confidence to communicate in another language with locals about complex subjects, like politics, that I often steered clear of when talking to strangers in the U.S., but that the French avidly asked me about, especially as the U.S. presidential election neared. Through these conversations, I bonded with the locals about how turbulent and divided both of our countries’ politics are and our hope for a more unified, open-minded future. I also developed the courage to talk to my host mom, Édith, and other locals about religion’s place in French society and their personal relationship with religion – a tough topic to broach when one of the central values France upholds is laïcité, or the complete separation between church and state.

My French skills especially blossomed thanks to my nightly dinners with Édith. On my very first night, Édith asked me for my thoughts about Kamala Harris’s surprise bid for the U.S. presidency, and in turn, I asked her about her opinion on President Emmanuel Macron’s call for snap legislature elections earlier in the summer to halt the rise of the far-right Rassemblement National party in France. I could tell these dinners wouldn’t be like my typical family dinners at home, where we chatted about our days and upcoming plans.

At first, these dinners filled me with anxiety because they tested my limited French abilities, but I came to cherish this ritual. Édith, an opinionated and insightful family counselor, welcomed an array of guests into her kitchen—an economics student from Kazakhstan, a Ukrainian refugee, and an Australian nurse studying French. I asked these guests about their lives, curious about the faraway places and foreign cultures they came from. We always discovered common threads—shared senses of TikTok humor, travel interests, and the commitment to master a second language.

Our dinner table conversations spanned topics as mundane as what we’d eaten for lunch, to differences in the French and American university systems, to the roots of Islamic terrorism and antisemitism in France. I stepped away from each dinner exhausted from concentrating for over an hour on my French, but feeling as if I had truly cultivated an intimate window into life in France.

It was Édith’s story of her father, a French prisoner of war during World War II, that inspired me to venture to Natzweiler-Struthof, a camp that remains largely overlooked by French locals and tourists alike. The reality that Édith, like so many Alsatians, was still tethered to the suffering of the Nazi occupation haunted me and fueled my desire to honor their memory by educating myself about their past. Visiting Struthof was one of the most moving experiences of my time abroad, as I not only witnessed the secluded camp where nearly 20,000 French Resistance fighters and political prisoners died for their beliefs, but also discovered the vision of a united and tolerant Europe that they established at the camp.

I’ll never forget the horrors of the concentration camp that took place in the seemingly peaceful forest. The generosity of the locals who were so willing to help me get there will also stay with me. As I connected with them and embraced my second language, I shed my shyness and truly immersed myself in Strasbourg—an unforgettable city with a history of resilience and genuine people that will remain a piece of me.