“It is with horror that we report the violent death of Boris Romantschenko in the war in Ukraine,” says a statement on the website of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation. The foundation said it learned of the elderly man’s death through his son and granddaughter.
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Romanchenko’s “appalling death,” the statement continued, “shows how threatening the war in Ukraine is for concentration camp survivors.”
The foundation, along with numerous others, has established an aid network that distributes food and medicine to Ukrainian victims of Nazi persecution. According to an American non-profit organization, The Blue Card, which provides financial assistance to destitute survivors in the United States, there are approximately 10,000 Holocaust survivors in Ukraine.
Romanchenko was born in 1926 in Bondari near the city of Sumy in northern Ukraine. In 1942 he was deported to the German city of Dortmund, where he became a forced laborer, according to the Buchenwald Foundation. Trying to escape, he was captured in January 1943 and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar in central Germany.
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He was later sent to Peenemünde, a military research center, where he helped build the V-2 Rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile. Other places of detention included Mittelbau-Dora, originally an annex of Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany that began as a POW camp and became a concentration camp in 1943.
In its statement, the foundation did not describe how Romantschenko survived Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated by the British 11th Armored Division in April 1945, and what he did after the war. However, for many years he was Vice-President for Ukraine in an international committee for Buchenwald survivors. At a ceremony in 2015, he recited an oath in Russian spoken by survivors of the camp, which has come to be known as the Oath of Buchenwald. It concludes with a promise: “Building a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
As of Sunday, 2,421 civilian casualties were recorded in Ukraine by the United Nations, including 925 deaths. Over the weekend, media in Kharkiv quoted the authorities as saying that 266 people, including 14 children, had died in the city.