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.
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 survivors 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 20th January, 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.
Read the article by Lidia Kelly in Sight Magazine.