Boris Romantschenko survived four Nazi concentration camps during World War II (File)
Berlin:
Boris Romantschenko, who survived four Nazi concentration camps during World War II, was killed by Russian shelling that hit his flat in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, the Buchenwald Memorial foundation said Monday. He was 96 years old.
“It is with dismay that we report the violent death of Boris Romantschenko in the war in Ukraine,” the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation said in a statement.
Romantschenko died at home on March 18 after his building was bombed in the heavily shelled eastern city, the statement said, citing information from his son and granddaughter.
Describing him as “a close friend,” the foundation said Romantschenko was committed to educating others about the horrors of the Nazi era and was vice president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.
Romantschenko was born on January 20, 1926, to a peasant family in Bondari, near the Ukrainian city of Sumy.
Although not Jewish, he was taken by German soldiers at the age of 16 and deported to the German city of Dortmund in 1942 to work as a forced laborer, as part of Nazi intimidation tactics against the Ukrainian population of the time.
A failed escape attempt brought him to the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943. He also spent time in the camps of Peenemuende, where he was forced to build V2 rockets, and in Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen.
“This is what they call the ‘operation of denazification,'” said the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s widely disbelieved claim that liberating Ukraine from Nazis was one of the reasons for the invasion of Moscow.
“The whole world sees the brutality of Russia,” Yermak added.
The Buchenwald Memorial said Romantschenko’s death “shows how dangerous the war in Ukraine is, including for concentration camp survivors.”
The foundation said it is working with 30 other memorial groups and associations to establish a “relief network” to support former Nazi persecutors in Ukraine, including through donations of food and medicine.
It also plans to provide practical assistance to survivors fleeing Ukraine by collecting them from the Ukrainian border or finding shelter in Germany.
Some 42,000 survivors of Nazi crimes still live in Ukraine, according to the aid network.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
