Remembrance and Vigilance: Vel' d'Hiv and the Enduring Logic of Exclusion

History does not repeat—but it insists.
It leaves behind traces: structures, habits, reflexes. This essay does not examine the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup as a tragedy locked in the past, but as a warning we may never have truly understood. Its aim is not to commemorate, but to comprehend—not to remember mechanically, but to recognize the early signs, the thresholds we cross in silence, the exclusionary logics that reemerge, masked in new forms, woven into the fabric of the present.

We no longer round people up—we sort.
We no longer deport—we displace.
The modern state no longer needs brutality to exclude: it has algorithms, databases, and invisible borders that quietly remove those it deems undesirable.
The unwanted are no longer pointed at—they are made administratively absent.
They cease to exist.

Europe outsources its borders. Authoritarian regimes rebrand repression as bureaucratic necessity. Democracies, in the name of pragmatism, grow accustomed to what they would once have condemned. The war in Ukraine, the vanishing of dissent, the targeting of minorities—these are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a world tilting, once again, toward an order where security justifies everything and habit numbs indignation.

But History offers only one warning. After that, it judges.
This book is a caution: it does not claim that history repeats—it reveals how it endures.