A 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, who survived three concentration camps and a forced labour camp, was killed late last week in a Russian strike on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
In a series of tweets, the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial institute confirmed the death of Borys Romanchenko.
The institute shared that Romanchenko survived the Bergen-Belsen, Peenemünde, Dora, and Buchenwald camps during the Second World War.
“We are stunned,” they wrote.
His granddaughter told the institute that her grandfather was at home, in a multi-storey building, when the apartment was hit by apparent Russian artillery.
Romanchenko worked “intensively” on documenting Nazi crimes and was vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.
According to regional emergency services, more than 500 people have been killed in Kharkiv since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba shared a photo and some words about Romanchenko on Twitter Monday.
“He lived a quiet life in Kharkiv until recently..last Friday, a Russian bomb hit his house and killed him,” Kuleba said, calling the airstrike on the Kharkiv apartment an “unspeakable crime.”
The killing of Romanchenko comes on the same weekend Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelenskyy drew a comparison between the Russian offensive and Nazi Germany’s plan to exterminate European Jewry during the Second World War.
“Listen to what is being said now in Moscow, listen to how they are saying those words again: the final solution. But this time in relation to us, to the Ukrainian question,” he said, in a livestreamed address to the Israeli parliament on Sunday.
Zelenskyy cited no evidence in making that allegation or identify who might have used the term. Putin has used an expression which means “final decision/final resolution” once in the past 30 days, according to Reuters monitoring of his remarks, but not in a context that carried the same resonance or meaning as the Nazi terminology.
Zelenskyy’s reference drew condemnation from Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial in Jerusalem to the six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany. It said such “irresponsible statements” trivialized the historical facts of the Holocaust.
— with files from Reuters