Boris Romantschenko, in his nineties, had survived four Nazi camps. He died in Kharkiv in the bombing of the building where he lived.
A Nazi concentration camp survivor, Boris Romantschenko, was killed in the bombing of the building where he lived in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, the German Buchenwald Memorials Foundation said on Monday (March 21). and Mittelbau-Dora.
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“A strike hit the multi-storey building in which he lived. His apartment burned down“, describes in a press release the Foundation which expresses its “horror” and “mourn the loss of a close friend“. Aged 96, the former prisoner of Buchenwald and vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee for Ukraine died on Friday, adds the organization which specifies that it was informed of his death by his granddaughter. Boris Romantschenko had been deported to Germany in 1942, at the age of 16, as a forced laborer. It was after an attempted escape that he was sent to the Buchenwald camp in central Germany in 1943. He was then interned in Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen, specifies the Foundation. . Before returning to Ukraine, he had to serve several years in the Soviet army stationed in East Germany, according to the charity association Maximilian Kolbe, engaged in material and psychological support for former prisoners of Nazi camps.
“Threat to camp survivors»
The association had been in contact for several years with Boris Romantschenko who was ill and could hardly leave the apartment where he lived alone, on the eighth floor of a building in Kharkiv, an employee of the AFP told AFP. NGO. “Horrific Death of Boris Romantschenko Shows How Threat the War in Ukraine Is to Concentration Camp Survivors“, underlines the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation, which is trying to send them medicine and food. She estimates that around 42,000 survivors of Nazi persecution currently live in Ukraine. Present at a commemoration ceremony marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp in 2012, Boris Romantschenko read there, the Foundation recalls, the Buchenwald oath: “Building a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal“. Besieged by Russian forces since the start of their offensive, the city of Kharkiv has been the target of several deadly strikes that have hit civilian buildings. Vladimir Putin keeps justifying the invasion of Ukraine by the need to “denazifythis country, a propaganda argument and a reference to the Second World War denounced in particular by historians.
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The chief of staff of the Ukrainian president, Andriy Yermak, spoke in a message on Telegram about the death of Boris Romantschenko, “a 96-year-old Nazi concentration camp prisoner who survived Buchenwald. But he died in 2022 from a Russian missile in his own apartment in Kharkiv. That’s what they call “the denazification operation””.
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