News Brief

(IsraelNN.com) Large black swastikas were found recently on a French memorial near Paris at the site of a deportation station during the Holocaust. The French Interior Ministry announced that the five-foot (1.5 meter) swastika was painted on a wagon, another one-meter high was found on the monument, and a third was painted on the wall of a shop in the Parisian suburb of Drancy.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie condemned the anti-Semitic acts and vowed to “use all means possible to identify the perpetrators of this unspeakable act and bring them to justice.” A Jewish Student Union, along with the CRIF, an umbrella group of French Jewry, condemned the incident on Saturday.

Drancy served as the main transit camp of French prisoners held by the German SS from 1941 to 1944. Over 76,000 people, mostly Jews, were deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor death camps. Only 2,000 survived. About 3,000 prisoners died at Drancy from abuse, starvation, or disease.