Vichy France

JERUSALEM - The pictures are haunting: black-and-white prints of a snow-covered barracks and paintings bordered by wire fences and skeletal trees, grim depictions of a World War II camp in France where Jews were interned before being transported to concentration camps.

French President Emmanuel Macron has made his first major intervention in the corporate world by nationalising a shipyard to stop it falling into Italian hands.

In a move that shows the limits of the new government’s economic liberalism, the finance ministry on Thursday said the state was exercising its pre-emption right to buy out all the shareholders in STX France.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing French leader, recently denied his country's responsibility over the roundup and deportation of French Jews during the WWII.

Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has touched a raw nerve in France by denying the French state's responsibility for a mass arrest of Jews in Paris during World War Two.

Just a few days before the mass deportations of Thessaloniki's Jews to Nazi concentration camps began in the cold tail-end of winter 1943, many Jewish parents left their children in the care of the Aghios Stylianos Foundling Home for their protection. Unable to bear the separation, most took their children back; but some stayed.

January 27 is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the date the United Nations chose to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust during World War II.

The anniversary, which is marked each year since 2005, falls on the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland by the Russian army in 1945.

President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic visited the World Centre for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem and expressed her “deepest regrets” about victims of the Nazi-allied regime in Croatia in WWII.

French MPs on June 24 approved a landmark deal with the United States in which France agreed to pay $60 million in overall compensation to foreign nationals deported to Nazi death camps on French trains in World War II.

Eight NGOs and some 30 individuals issued a joint statement on Wednesday calling on Nikolic to apologise for making what they called "racist statements".

While marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Serbia on January 27, Nikolic questioned why millions of Jews were exterminated during World War II.