He survived the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II and he survived the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in the same war. And the Bergen-Belsen camp.
Last week, Boris Romanchenko, a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, was killed when shelling hit his apartment in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
“It is with horror that we report the violent death of Boris Romanchenko in the war in Ukraine,” the memorial for the Buchenwald said on Monday in a statement.
Photo: AFP / Michael REICHEL / Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation
The multi-story apartment building where Romanchenko lived was shelled and caught on fire,” the statement said.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has been under heavy fire from Russian artillery throughout the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation” necessary to disarm and “de-Nazify” its neighbor.
“Please think about how many things he has come through, but was killed by a Russian strike, which hit an ordinary Kharkiv multi-story building,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday. “With each day of this war, it becomes more obvious what de-Nazification means to them.”
Romanchenko was born on Jan. 20, 1926, in Bondari, near the city of Sumy, the Buchenwald memorial statement said.
He was deported to Dortmund in 1942, where he was forced into mining work, it said.
After an unsuccessful escape attempt, he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943, where more than 53,000 people were killed during World War II, it said.
He was then sent to Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, where he worked as a forced laborer on the V2 rocket program, the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the statement said.
“The horrific death of Boris Romanchenko shows how threatening the war in Ukraine is for the concentration camp survivors,” the statement said. “We mourn the loss of a close friend.”
Romanchenko had served for many years as the vice president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee, devoting himself to documenting the Nazi crimes, the memorial said.
Ukraine’s foreign and defense ministries condemned the death.
“Putin managed to ‘accomplish’ what even Hitler couldn’t,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense wrote on Twitter.
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