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Ukrainian Holocaust survivor killed by Russian shelling
96-year-old Boris Romantschenko survived Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen concentration camps
March 21, 2022 13:44
96-year-old Boris Romantschenko survived Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen concentration camps
March 21, 2022 13:44A Ukrainian Holocaust survivor has been killed by Russian forces in Kharkiv, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation has said.
96-year-old Boris Romantschenko, who survived the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen Belsen concentration camps, was reportedly killed last Friday.
Mr Romantscheno’s granddaughter told the Foundation his apartment building was hit by a shell.
In a tweet, they said they were “stunned” by the news.
Mr Romanchenko worked intensively on the memory of Nazi crimes, they added, and was vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.
In 2012, Mr Romanchenko spoke at a celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
At the ceremony he read a pledge written by Buchenwald survivors to "build a new world of peace and freedom."
Mr Romanchenko’s death marks another tragic coda to Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia is justified in invading Ukraine because it must “denazify” the country.
It comes just weeks after Russian bombs hit Babyn Yar, a memorial on the site of one of the Holocaust’s single largest massacres.
At the time, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky said: "To the world, what is the point of saying 'never again' for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?"