A Nazi concentration camp survivor, Boris Romantschenko, was killed in the bombing of the building where he lived in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, the German Buchenwald and Mittelbau Memorials Foundation said on Monday. – Dora.
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“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.
“He survived in Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Peenemünde and Bergen-Belsen, in the death camps erected by Hitler’s partisans. And now he was killed by a Russian bombardment that hit an ordinary building in Kharkiv. Every day of this war shows more clearly what + denazification + for + them +”, denounced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a video published Monday evening on Telegram.
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.
Mr. Romantschenko had been deported to Germany in 1942, at the age of 16, as a forced laborer. It was after an attempted escape 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. .
“Threat to Survivors”
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.
Present at a commemoration ceremony marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp in 2012, Boris Romantschenko had read there, recalls the Foundation, the Buchenwald oath: “The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal”.
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.