A Roma man was for the first time guest of honour at official Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations in Germany Thursday and made a poignant call for better treatment of his people in Europe.

On January 27, the synagogue in the Yekaterinburg JCC hosted a memorial ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

January 27 is officially acknowledged in Estonia as Holocaust Remembrance Day, as in numerous other countries. On that morning, Jews and guests gathered for a commemoration ceremony near the memorial complex established on the site of the former Klooga concentration camp. In the Klooga camp, the Nazis and local collaborators killed nearly 2,000 Jews.

Turkey held its first state ceremony in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

In a muddy disused railyard, the French state rail company SNCF on Tuesday mourned thousands of Jews deported on its trains from this very spot to Nazi death camps.

The Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, in cooperation with the presidency of the European Parliament, the European Jewish Congress and the Holocaust Memorial of Yad Vashem, holds on Tuesday in Brussels an event to mark International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the Holocaust ''the darkest chapter in history'' at a synagogue service remembering the victims.

A project to save Holocaust-era mass graves from oblivion in Eastern Europe has received about $400,000 from the German Foreign Ministry.

Notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was a secret agent for West German intelligence in Bolivia after World War II.

Spain has called for an international arrest warrant against alleged former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk for complicity in ''crimes against humanity'' over the deaths of Spanish prisoners during World War II.