Boris Romanchenko managed to survive four Nazi concentration camps during World War II. But earlier this month the 96-year-old Holocaust survivor was killed when a Russian shell hit his apartment building in the city of Kharkiv.
His death was noted in a Tweet by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation. It read: “As we learned from relatives, our friend Boris Romanchenko, who had survived the concentration camps #Buchenwald , #Peenemünde , #Dora and #BergenBelsen , was killed in a bomb attack on his house in #Charkiw last Friday. We are deeply dismayed.
His grand-daughter Yulia said after the shell hit his apartment “everything burned down completely, The only thing left were bones on the bed frame, just as he’d been lying.”
This is Romanchenko’s apartment looked after the shell struck on March 18.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy paid tribute to Romanchenko in a video message last Monday:
“Just imagine how much he went through! He survived Buchenwald, Dora, Peenemuende and Bergen-Belson, the conveyors of death created by the Nazis. And he was killed by a Russian shell that hit an ordinary Kharkiv high-rise. With every day of this war, it becomes more and more obvious what they (Russians) mean by ‘de-Nazification.’”
In Berlin, the Bundestag, the German parliament, stood in silence last Monday to honor Romanchenko and other victims of the war in Ukraine.
Deputy Speaker Katrin Goering-Eckardt said:
“His death reminds us that Germany has a special historical responsibility toward Ukraine. Boris Romanchenko is one of thousands of dead in Ukraine. Every single life that has been taken reminds us to do everything we can to stop this cruel war that violates international law and to help people in and from Ukraine.”
On Thursday, Romanchenko was laid to rest at a Kharkiv cemetery. The funeral was attended by his son and his grand-daughter, His son told Reuters in a video that the family tried to get him to leave his apartment.
“We kept visiting him after the bombardment started, bringing him food. He categorically refused to leave. He wouldn’t have been able to. He could hardly walk,” his son said.
Romanchenko’s son said that he has educational file that he made for his father to use when he gave lectures about his experience to students in Ukraine and Germany. He said, “Nothing has been lost. Nothing will be forgotten. I will restore it all.”
Romanchenko dedicated his life to keeping alive the memory of Nazi crimes and was vice president of the Ukrainian chapter of the International Buchenwald-Dora Committee.
The independent Russian news website, Meduza, now based in Riga, Latvia, published a biography of Romanchenko, which I’ve summarized.
Romanchenko was born in 1926 in Bondary, a village near Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine that is the scene of heavy fighting in the current war.
After the Germans occupied the town, the 16-year-old Romanchenko was deported to Germany in 1942 to do forced labor in a mine near Dortmund. After he tried to escape, he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in January 1943 where he worked in a quarry. He then was transferred to Peenemunde, where the V-2 ballistic missile was being developed, and worked as a mechanic for several months.
From there, he was sent to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where he lived and worked in underground tunnels for several months. In March 1945, he endured a grueling trip to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In a video for the Babi-Yar Holocaust Memorial Center near Kyiv, which was recently damaged when Russian forces fired on a nearby TV tower, Romanchenko recounted that experience.
He said the prisoners were packed into a small freight car, standing up against each other, and traveled for seven days without being given anything to eat, before arriving at Bergen-Belsen. He said people would sit on anyone who died during the trip. When he arrived, he found that Bergen-Belsen was already packed full with prisoners brought there from camps all over Germany.
“After seven days of hunger, [...] I didn’t have any energy left. I just had the strength to climb onto the second level of the bed, where I thought, ‘That’s it, you’re not getting out of here.’ Because they brought us there specifically to destroy us. I’m lying there, lying there, and then a guy from below climbs in and brings two rutabegas.”
Romanchenko weighed only 86 pounds when the camp was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945. There were thousands of bodies lying unburied and 60,000 starving and ill prisoners who had been left without food, water or basic sanitation in the days before liberation. Nearly 14,000 prisoners died after liberation.
Romanchenko was 24 years old when he finally returned to Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, in 1950 after having to serve several years in the Soviet Army in Berlin. He later worked in agricultural machinery production before he retired in 1997.
According to the website of the Maximilian Kolbe Foundation, a German non-profit which supports concentration camp survivors, Romanchenko lived alone in a one-room apartment on the eighth floor of the apartment building in Kharkiv. He suffered from leg pain and needed help paying for medicine and a nurse.
Romanchenko traveled to Buchenwald many times to meet with other survivors. In 2015, he read the Oath of Buchenwald at a ceremony at the memorial, according his obituary on the website of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, The oath was written by survivors of the camp on April 19, 1945 shortly after U.S. troops liberated the camp.
It includes these words:
“The destruction of Nazism, down to its roots, is our motto. To build a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
Another victim of Vladimir Putin’s fictitious mission to “de-Nazify” Ukraine.