BERLIN (AP) – Germany’s parliament on Tuesday paid tribute to Boris Romanchenko, who survived several Nazi concentration camps during World War II but was killed in an attack in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv last week. He was 96.
The Buchenwald concentration camp memorial announced on Monday that Romantschenko, who survived Buchenwald and the Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen camps, was killed on Friday. It said that according to his granddaughter, the multi-storey building where he lived was hit by a projectile.
Romanchenko dedicated himself to remembering Nazi crimes and was vice president of the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee, the memorial said.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted the sad irony of Romanchenko’s death.
“Imagine how much he’s been through!” Zelenskyj said in a video speech late Monday. “He survived Buchenwald, Dora, Peenemünde and Bergen-Belson, the messengers of death created by the Nazis. And he was killed by a Russian shell that hit an ordinary high-rise building in Kharkiv. With each passing day of this war it is becoming more and more obvious what they (the Russians) mean by ‘denazification’.”
Deputy spokeswoman Katrin Göring-Eckardt paid tribute to Romanchenko on Tuesday at the opening of a session of the German Bundestag.
She said Romanchenko was brought to Dortmund as a forced laborer in 1942 and sent to the concentration camps in 1943 after an attempt to escape. Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
“His death reminds us that Germany has a special historic responsibility towards Ukraine,” Göring-Eckardt said. “Boris Romanchenko is one of thousands dead in Ukraine. Every single life killed reminds us to do everything we can to end this cruel and illegal war and to help the people in and from Ukraine.”
Lawmakers observed a minute’s silence in memory of Romanchenko and other victims of the war.
Romanchenko “survived four concentration camps and was now killed in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine,” said Finance Minister Christian Lindner. “His fate shows both the criminal character of Russian politics and why Germany shows solidarity with Ukraine, why we have to show solidarity.”