Is it right to call the migrant detainment centers on our southern border “concentration camps,” as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did recently? Her comments were meant to evoke the Holocaust, and to call forth our indignation at our government’s mistreatment of refugees. But 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.

We know a lot about these camps thanks in part to Varian Fry, an American journalist who helped save thousands of writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo, and Daniel Bénédite, his close associate. In 1940, they reported on French internment centers that held paperless refugees from Nazi Europe as well as “undesirables.” Fry’s archives at Columbia include a record of their findings, based on visits to the camps and interviews with hundreds of refugees.

In some obvious ways, those camps were far worse than our detainment centers. Refugees lived in unheated barracks and used open latrines, the contents of which blew about in rough weather. Typhus and dysentery were rampant. 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 there were some striking similarities between the French camps and our own. Consider 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.”

Reading this, I couldn’t help thinking of Clint, where the young detainees, ranging in age from a few months to 17 years old, were separated from their parents with no idea if or when they’d see them again. Kids of all ages received the same scant rations — instant oatmeal, instant noodles, a frozen burrito for dinner — and were reported to be hungry. Children as young as 8 were caring for toddlers, some of whom lacked diapers. All were living in filth, without soap or toothbrushes. Many caught the flu.

In certain ways, compared to the French camps, 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. Unlike in Clint, where the kids weren’t even given toothbrushes, inmates at Rivesaltes Camp in France had access to a dentist (though, as a letter-writer points out, the dentist had to work without a drill). At Gurs, women and children at least had beds or cots, and “coverlets” that were “sufficient in number,” while children in Clint have been sleeping on the floor in freezing cells, coverless, the lights kept on at all hours.

One inmate at Les Milles, 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.” Amid the misery, one can’t help but note that at least she was caring for her own child, and that the sick boy had the comfort of his mother’s presence.

The inmates in France also had access to the outside world. They wrote letters, and well-wishers sent gifts — a package wrapping preserved in Fry’s archives, addressed to an inmate at Vernet, is marked “cadeau.” 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 and document the inmates’ plight, while our government has severely limited journalists’ access to detainment centers, citing legal issues around privacy concerns. On Wednesday, a group of journalists were allowed to make a brief visit to Clint, but they were prohibited from taking photos or from speaking to the detainees.

We know what we do about Clint thanks largely to Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She and a few other lawyers have been allowed to visit certain detainment centers, thanks to a 1997 settlement with the Border Patrol. Shortly after Ms. Mukherjee’s account, the Trump administration moved hundreds of children out of Clint and into larger detainment centers in nearby El Paso. But more than 100 were later returned, and are there still.

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

One of Fry’s associates wrote something similar from Gurs in 1940: “These wretched and inhumane conditions speak for themselves.” But inhumane conditions don’t speak for themselves, not without witnesses. Allowing in more outside observers would be one way our government could at least approach the moral level of Vichy France.

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.

Julie Orringer is the author of the novel “The Flight Portfolio,” based on the life of Varian Fry.

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