He had survived the Nazi camps. Barbarism caught up with him 70 years later. Boris Romantschenko, was killed in the bombing of the building where he lived, in Kharkiv, in the north-east of Ukraine, indicated Monday the German Foundation of the Memorials of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.
“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 “mourns 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.
Forced into Soviet troops
Boris Romantschenko had been deported to Germany in 1942, at the age of 16, as a forced laborer. It was after an escape attempt 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. 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.
“The horrible death of Boris Romantschenko shows how much the war in Ukraine is a threat to the survivors of the concentration camps”, underlines the Foundation of the Memorials of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora which tries to send them medicine and food. She estimates that around 42,000 survivors of Nazi persecution currently live in Ukraine.
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 continues to justify the invasion of Ukraine by the need to “denazify” this country, a propaganda argument and a reference to the Second World War denounced in particular by historians.
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 prisoner of the Nazi concentration camps who survived Buchenwald. But he died in 2022 from a Russian missile in his own apartment in Kharkiv. This is what they call “the denazification operation”.