French President Francois Hollande inaugurated a Holocaust memorial center in the Parisian suburb town of Drancy, a former internment camp from where thousands of French Jews were deported.

Hollande laid a wreath at the bottom of the memorial, a symbolic wooden train bogie dubbed a "memory wagon" with a train track leading up to it.

In a speech after the ceremony, Hollande stressed the importance of remembering one of France's darkest moments. Hollande condemned anti-semitism and racism and urged the French to continue to fight against it.

Between 1941 and 1944, some 60,000 Jews were deported from Drancy to Holocaust death camps.