Ukrainian volunteers have collected the remains of a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor who died in a Russian rocket attack.
Boris Romanchenko survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen and Peenemünde during World War II.
He died on Friday when a Russian missile hit his apartment building in the second city of Kharkov. Earlier today, his remains were removed from the destroyed building by a group of volunteers.
The news of his death was reported by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation and confirmed by Romanchenko’s son and granddaughter.
The foundation, which manages the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora camp memorials and supports education about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, said: “We are deeply saddened by Romanchenko’s death.
“We mourn the loss of a close friend. We wish his son and granddaughter, who brought us the sad news, a lot of strength in these difficult times,” the foundation said in a statement.
Boris Romanchenko, a survivor of four Nazi concentration camps, died Friday when a Russian rocket hit his apartment building in Kharkiv’s second city.
Earlier today, his remains were removed from the collapsed building by a team of volunteers.
An elderly Romanchenko, dressed in blue and white concentration camp insignia, stood in front of the infamous “Jedem Das Seine” sign adorning the gates of Buchenwald.
Romanchenko was a long-term vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee in Ukraine and regularly participated in memorial and memory parades.
His death comes as a result of continuous Russian bombing of residential centers throughout Ukraine as they continue their attempts to subdue the nation.
Boris Romanchenko was born on January 20, 1926 in the village of Bondari near Sumy in the North-East of Ukraine.
Although he was not Jewish, German soldiers captured him when he was 16 years old and deported him to the German city of Dortmund in 1942 to work as forced labor as part of the Nazi tactics of intimidating the Ukrainian population at the time.
As a result of an unsuccessful escape attempt in 1943, he was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, but he also spent time in the Mittelbau-Dora subcamp, as well as in Bergen-Belsen and Peenemünde, where prisoners were forced to build V-2 rockets for the Nazi war effort. .
Despite terrible conditions, Romanchenko managed to survive a three-year Nazi captivity.
During the celebration of the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald in 2012, a Holocaust survivor returned to the concentration camp square and declared in Russian: “Our ideal is to build a new world, peace and freedom,” part of the oath taken by survivors in the camps.
Municipal workers and volunteers clean up rubble from a damaged apartment building in Kharkiv amid Russia’s ongoing attack on Ukraine
A photo posted on Twitter by the Buchenwald-Dora Foundation shows an aged Romanchenko, dressed in the blue and white stripes of a concentration camp prisoner, standing in front of the infamous phrase “Jedem Das Seine” adorning the gates of Buchenwald.
This phrase, translated as “to each his own” or “to each what he deserves,” was cynically used by the Nazis in tandem with the phrase “work sets you free” as they massacred millions of Jews.
The foundation said it was working with 30 other memory groups and associations to create a “help network” to support former Nazi victims in Ukraine, including through donations of food and medicine.
It also plans to offer practical assistance to survivors fleeing Ukraine by picking them up from the Ukrainian border or finding them accommodation in Germany.
About 42,000 survivors of Nazi crimes still live in Ukraine, according to the Aid Network.
Buchenwald-Dora Foundation director Jens-Christian Wagner confirmed Romanchenko’s death and said the elderly Holocaust survivor stayed close to his apartment for months for fear of contracting Covid prior to the Russian invasion.
In February, Wagner warned that Ukrainian Holocaust survivors in the country’s east were in danger as Russia launched its invasion.
Romanchenko miraculously survived three years of Nazi captivity and four different concentration camps (Liberated prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, April 16, 1945)
In this file photo taken on January 27, 2020, a barbed wire fence surrounds the memorial of the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald near Weimar, eastern Germany.
He said the war is “particularly tragic for the survivors of the Ukrainian concentration camps, who suffered along with Russian prisoners in the camps and who are now sitting in a bomb shelter, and their lives are threatened by Russian bombs.”
“This is what they call a ‘denazification operation,'” Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement, which many do not believe, that ridding Ukraine of the Nazis was one of the reasons for Moscow’s invasion.
“The whole world sees the cruelty of Russia,” Yermak added.
The Russian offensive against Ukraine, which has been going on for the fourth week, was stopped by the Ukrainian army and territorial defense forces, which inflicted heavy losses on the invaders.
But Moscow’s failure to capture a single major Ukrainian city has led Putin’s forces to resort to using their air superiority and heavy artillery to carry out sustained bombardments of residential areas, causing massive destruction and significant civilian casualties.
Nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people have already been uprooted from their homes, including 3.4 million who have fled abroad, in one of the fastest exoduses on record, according to the UN.
The UN tally includes over 900 confirmed civilian deaths, but the true toll is thought to be much higher.