Thread by @pleasesaveour

Great piece!

Should We Call Detention Centers Concentration Camps?
A better historical analog would be the internment camps of Vichy France. But that’s no compliment.

nytimes.com/2019/06/29/opi…

historical parallels should be drawn carefully; what’s happening in Clint, Tex., is not equivalent to what took place in Sobibor, Treblinka or Auschwitz.

There is another historical analog that seems more apt: the internment camps in Vichy France that housed refugees from

occupied Europe in the 1940s.

French internment centers held paperless refugees from Nazi Europe as well as “undesirables.” In some obvious ways, those camps were far worse than our detainment centers. Refugees lived in unheated barracks and used open latrines

To the extent that refugees were fed, they got watery soups, served with a weak coffee substitute and hard brown bread. In warmer weather, bugs and vermin swarmed. The scale of those camps dwarfed our own detention centers. And many thousands of inmates were deported to

Germany for extermination.

BUT
a 1940 letter from a kindergarten teacher interned at Gurs. “Imagine, if you can, our camp with about 700 children under the age of 18,” she wrote. “The youngest is 2 months old. We don’t even know the names of the parents of many of these

children. These children do not understand why they are shut up in this terrible camp now. We can’t give them enough food, we can’t wash them, and they can’t even play but must sit about freezing in the cold, dark and dirty barracks.”

In certain ways conditions in our

detainment centers are actually worse

One refugee in France complained about not having fat in which to cook his fresh vegetables. Our young detainees have no fresh produce at all. Inmates in France had access to a dentist. Women and children at least had beds or cots

The mother of a sick child, wrote that life in the camp was “terrible for me, and for my poor little boy, who had to witness such abominable scenes.” One can’t help but note that at she was caring for her own child and that the sick boy had the comfort of his mother’s presence

Inmates in France also had access to the outside world. They wrote letters, and well-wishers sent gifts. The border station in Clint, on the other hand, has turned away gifts of food, diapers and clothes.

One of the most striking differences is that in the camps of France

humanitarian workers and journalists were allowed to visit.

“If journalists had access to the detention centers at the border where children are being held in filthy conditions, those centers would not exist.”

Once refugees have crossed our borders, we have a responsibility

to treat them with compassion. If we fail to do that, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear ourselves compared to those who have oppressed other human beings during the worst periods of our history.

nytimes.com/2019/06/29/opi…
yadvashem.org/download/educa…

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