Boris Romantschenko had been deported as a forced laborer to Germany in 1942, at the age of 16. It was after an escape attempt that he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in central Germany in 1943.
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He had survived the Buchenwald camp in 1943. Boris Romantschenko, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, was killed in the bombing of the building where he lived in Kharkiv (Ukraine), announced the German Buchenwald Memorials Foundation and Mittelbau-Dora, Monday, March 21.
“A strike hit the multi-storey building in which he lived. His apartment burned down”described in a press release the Foundation, which expressed its “horror” and “mourn the loss of a close friend”.
Boris Romantschenko survived the concentration camps #Buchenwald, #Peenemunde, #Dora and #BergenBelsen. Now he has been killed by a bullet that hit his house in #Charkiv, #Ukraine. He was 96 years old. We are stunned. pic.twitter.com/ZZIK2OdbAu
— Stift. Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora (@Buchenwald_Dora) March 21, 2022
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.
Boris Romantschenko was deported as a forced laborer to Germany in 1942, at the age of 16. 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. . 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.
Boris Romantschenko was sick and could hardly leave the apartment where he lived alone, on the eighth floor of a building in Kharkiv, a collaborator of the NGO told AFP.