In August 2009, when an Italy-bound boat carrying seventy-eight Eritrean refugees sank because no action was taken to rescue them, an Italian journalist compared the indifference to their fate with the indifference to the plight of Jews during the Shoah. Parallels between the Shoah and migration are becoming increasingly frequent and give rise to various kinds of analogies between the past and the present. Using the Holocaust to convey the ordeal faced by migrants today or to attempt to comprehend the present implies, as I will argue in this essay, a certain «familiarity» with the event coupled with a vision of history as continuity, as cause-effect relationships. That is why, these analogies can have «dangerous» effects. It is necessary to acknowledge the distance at which we stand from the past and the irremediable lacunae existing in our knowledge of it. As I will discuss, listening to these lacunae can turn into a rewarding endeavour. I will draw on the concept of «constellation» and «image» developed by Walter Benjamin in order to envisage a relationship between the past and the present that relinquishes linear connections and identifies and pursues gaps, ruptures, and conflicts. To illustrate this concept, I will explore a short film by Italian director Ettore Scola titled 43-97, which creates a clear connection between Jewish persecution in 1940s Italy and racism towards immigrants in contemporary Italian society in a way that renounces analogies and builds on discontinuities and differences.