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HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR KILLED IN RUSSIAN BOMBING OF KHARKIV

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR KILLED IN RUSSIAN BOMBING OF KHARKIV
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Wayne Lumbasi

A 96-year-old Holocaust survivor was killed last week in a Russian bombing in his home city of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

The victim, Borys Romanchenko, survived the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen during World War II. The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation confirmed Romanchenko’s death in tweet on Monday.

Apartments destroyed by Russian shelling in central Kharkiblv Courtesy /Reuters/

The foundation said Romanchenko’s granddaughter told them the multi-story building he was living in was hit by Russian shells, adding they were “deeply disturbed” by the news of his death.

Born in 1926 to a farming family in the village of Bondari outside the city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine, Romanchenko was taken as a prisoner of war after the German Nazi regime launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941.

“The war had completely surprised us, I wasn’t able to flee,” he recalled in an interview in April 2004.

In 1942, he was deported to Dortmund, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr valley, to work as forced laborer in a mine.

After attempting to escape, he was seized just as he was about to board an east-bound train and was then deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in January 1943.

Romanchenko was later moved to Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, where he was made to work on the V2 rocket programme, as well as Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

Boris Romantschenko reading at the memorial in 2015 Courtesy /Reuters/

Romanchenko said he was liberated from Bergen-Belsen by British and American allied forces on 14 April 1945 just before he and other survivors were due to be killed by being fed poisoned food.

He was enlisted to the Soviet army for five years after the end of the war. Afterwards, he began to play an active part in institutions that commemorate the Holocaust, acting for several years as vice-president for Ukraine on the international committee at the Buchenwald-Doramemorial foundation.

He attended several commemorative events at the camp’s former site and had been invited to attend an event marking the Buchenwald liberation this year. In 2015, he read out the “Oath of Buchenwald”, a survivors’ pledge dating back to the camp’s liberation, in Russian.

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Wayne Lumbasi