Lidia Kelly

(Reuters] – He survived World War II’s Nazi Buchenwald concentration camps. He was able to escape the Dora-Mittelbau concentration prison during that same war. The Bergen-Belsen camp.

Boris Romanchenko was a Holocaust survivor aged 96 who was hit by shelling last week in Kharkiv.

The Buchenwald Memorial said Monday that it was horrified to report Boris Romanchenko’s death in Ukraine during the conflict.

Romanchenko’s multi-storey apartment was set on fire by shelling,” the statement said.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second biggest city. Russian artillery has kept it under fire throughout the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin called a “special army operation” to dearm and “denazify its neighbor.

Late Monday, President Volodymyr Zilenskiy stated that he had seen many successes.

“But ()He was struck by a Russian missile and killed. The strike hit a Kharkiv multi-storey house. Each day in this war makes it more apparent what denazification means for them.”

According to the Buchenwald memorial, Romanchenko was born in Bondari on January 20, 1926.

After being deported from Dortmund, in 1942, he was forced to perform mining labor. He was unsuccessfully able to escape and was deported to Dortmund in 1942. There, he had to do forced mining labour. In 1943 Buchenwald, more than 53,000 were murdered during World War II.

He was then sent to Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, where he worked as a forced labourer on the V2 rocket programme, the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the statement said.

According to the statement, “The terrible death of Boris Romanchenko is a sign how grave the conflict in Ukraine can be for survivors in concentration camps,” it said.

“We grieve the loss of a dear friend.”

The memorial says that Romanchenko was the vice-president of Buchenwald-Dora International Committee for many years and devoted himself to documentation about Nazi crimes.

Both the defense and foreign ministries in Ukraine condemned this death.

On Twitter, the Ukraine’s Defence Ministry stated that Putin had ‘accomplished’ what Hitler was unable to.