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Ukraine holocaust survivor killed

WWII Holocaust survivor killed in Ukraine’s Kharkiv

A destroyed during shelling building in downtown of Kharkiv, Ukraine, 13 March 2022. Public transport, shops and pharmacies do not work in the city. At night, the city is shelled. Russian troops entered Ukraine on 24 February prompting the country's president to declare martial law and triggering a series of announcements by Western countries to impose severe economic sanctions on Russia. EPA-EFE/VASILIY ZHLOBSKY

March 22 (Reuters) - He survived the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II. He survived the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in the same war. And the Bergen-Belsen camp.

By Lidia Kelly

Last week, Boris Romanchenko, a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, was killed when shelling hit his ordinary flat in the war-ravaged 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.

The multi-storey apartment building where Romanchenko lived was shelled and caught on fire,” said the statement.

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 “denazify” its neighbour.

“Please think about how many things he has come through,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said late on Monday.

“But [he] was killed by a Russian strike, which hit an ordinary Kharkiv multi-storey building. With each day of this war, it becomes more obvious what denazification means to them.”

Romanchenko was born on Jan. 20, 1926, in Bondari, near the city of Sumy according to the statement from the Buchenwald memorial.

He was deported to Dortmund in 1942, where he had to do forced mining labour. 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.

He was then sent to Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, where he worked as a forced labourer on the V2 rocket programme, 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 memorial said in the statement.

“We mourn the loss of a close friend.”

According to the memorial, Romanchenko had served for many years as the vice president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee, devoting himself to documenting the Nazi crimes.

Both Ukraine’s foreign and defence ministries condemned the death.

“Putin managed to ‘accomplish’ what even Hitler couldn’t,” Ukraine’s Defence Ministry said on its Twitter account.

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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Helen Swingler says:

    The ironies are just too tragic. Some legacy Comrade Putin. What a great man you are. We should erect a statue to you, made of the bones of innocents.

  • Neil Parker says:

    What is there to say except to salute Mr Romanchenko and his compatriots? Mr Putin has lost the plot altogether and is making a mockery of himself and all of Russia.

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