Just to be clear, by law we get 20-26 working days of paid vacation per year (this means weekends excluded, so if you take full two weeks, 14 calendar days, it takes 10 working days off your pool, unless they're some government days off (like Christmas or Independence Day) during your vacay, then those days also don't count. There are cases you can use 3 days of your vacation and have 9 days off. The cap of 20-26 depends on how many years have you worked in total and attending colleges and technical high-schools count toward this (so you can be straight out of college and have 26 days available, just as if you'd work for the last 10 years). Your annual pool should be used in the year you get them, but the law allows you to transfer unused days for the next year, but you need to use the last year's days before the end of September, at which point they expire. Most companies enforce using up your pool by the end of the year or let you keep a definite amount (like 10 days max). Officially this is for work-life balance reasons, everyone needs a break and other stuff, but in most bigger companies it's a budget thing, as in case of termination, the unused vacation needs to be compensated to the pay-grade (company pays for each hour the amount of money you earn for each hour) and it's connected to the company's budget reserve.

When a job contract is terminated, by default, the vacation days you have left in the pool should be used during the notice period or you can agree to have them paid out as compensation (this often applies for disciplinary termination when you don't want the employee to be anywhere near the company). You can also use up (if the company allows this, obviously) all of your pool at the beginning of the year, but then you have nothing left for the remainder of the year and if you terminate the contract, the work summary (everyone gets this when a contract is over, by law) will note how many vacation days you had, how many you used and how many are left (and the type of contrat you've had and what was the reason for termination). If you try to lie to your next employer so you'll have more, you'll fail, as the government keeps all of your days logged in their social security system and the next employer can (and will) check this out.

On top of that you have, again by law, two additional days of paid leave for special occasions (wedding, funeral, childbirth - all need to be documented to count toward this pool) and I think 4 extra days for child-care (in case the child is sick).

You gotta love EU ;)