Reflections on a Trip to Paris: Haunted by the past, or blissfully ignorant in the present?
Penn Global Seminar: Paris Under the German Occupation and Its Places in [Non-] Memory
Lumi, one of the Spring 2026 Penn Global Seminar Correspondents, shares their experience abroad during the Spring Break. Follow along with the group of correspondents on our blog and look out for their images on the @pennabroad Instagram feed.
All semester, our class has focused on what life was like in Paris during the German occupation. Nazi Germany occupied the northern half of France (including Paris), and the French government was replaced with a new government, the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis. The Vichy regime enacted laws and policies that marginalized the sovereignty of Jewish people living in France, and supported Nazi efforts to identify Jewish people, which would later devolve into rounding them up and sending them to internment camps and killing centers. Our class has been laser-focused on dissecting this dark period of history, specifically how it played out in Paris.
Then, on March 7th, we arrived in Paris. Our hotel was situated next to the historic Place de la République, and streets were filled with bustling boulangeries, cafes, and restaurants. We arrived in the middle of Paris Fashion Week, surrounded by people showing off impressive fashion and luxury brands. Plazas and parks were filled with happy families, couples, and groups of friends, some of whom you could tell lived in the area, and some of whom you could tell were tourists enjoying a trip abroad. The next day, colorful signs and dedicated athletes filled the streets of Paris for one of the world’s largest half-marathons, the HOKA Semi de Paris. Passing by this spectacle, we went into Paris’s Mémorial de la Shoah to dive even deeper into one of the world’s darkest periods in history.
Everything felt like a contradiction. We would walk along a quaint, peaceful road in the suburbs and stop to talk about how thousands of deportees walked along this same road before being sent to an internment camp. We would admire the picturesque streetside cafes, with images of a world where these cafes were full of Nazi soldiers and officers fresh in our minds from class. And while admiring the colorful signage of the half-marathon at the Rue de Rivoli, I realized that the only other image we had seen of the Rue de Rivoli was one filled with the flags of Nazi Germany during the occupation.
The complete reverse was the reality for the French living during the occupation: life was filled with reminders of the occupation. The flags of Nazi Germany were hung where the French flag once waved proudly. Cafes were filled with foreign soldiers. Signs were now almost entirely written in German, a language undecipherable to someone who had only grown up speaking French. Yet the images of life before, French flags waving in the wind, cafes full of your fellow Frenchmen, and the familiar signs in your native language… they were all memories at that point.
Visiting Paris and being so cognizant of the dark history of World War II felt like being haunted. We saw amazing sights, lush parks, and laughed together as a community of learners, but the phantom of the history we were learning about always seemed to loom over me. We could not forget the reason we were here in the first place: it was to give attention and awareness to that history.
Our class had the fortunate opportunity to meet and talk with Rachel Psankiewicz Jedinak, a Jewish woman who was a child living in Paris during the occupation. She escaped during the Vel d’Hiv roundup and now dedicates her life to sharing her history and talking to youth about the importance of connection, empathy, and honoring history. And in that meeting, she shared her frustrations with the exact opposite experience: after the war, there was an overwhelming silence and ignorance from people. People who either did not want to hear about the atrocities of the war or about Vichy, or who denied and ignored it.
This experience made me think about the false dichotomy we sometimes feel exists: like we have to choose between living in the past or looking to the future. The tension between those two options always exists: we have to keep moving forward, but we also can’t forget the past so that we don’t allow mistakes to repeat themselves. And yet, that tension is precisely what has made this trip so meaningful.
To experience a place is to recognize that it’s alive with memory, resilience, and change, and to embrace that dynamism. It felt easy to let the weight of this history completely dominate our minds while walking around Paris, to feel like every observation had to be tied back to what once was. But our professor Mélanie Péron has reminded us, again and again, that understanding a place also means allowing ourselves to experience it as it exists now. She created intentional time to reflect on history together, but also carved out intentional time to have fun together as a group, whether it was over a meal or at a tourist attraction.
If there’s anything I’ve learned on this trip, it’s that those two mindsets of looking back to the past and looking ahead to the future can and must coexist. So that we can honor the importance of history while also looking to the future and paving a path forward.