Ukraine : No country for old Holocaust survivor, Borys Romanchenko, slaughtered by a Russian missile

A week ago, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, wrote on Twitter : 'Borys Romanchenko, 96, survived four Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen. He lived his quiet life in Kharkiv until recently. Last Friday a Russian bomb hit his house and killed him. Unspeakable crime. Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin'.

Borys was born in 1926 to a Jewish family in the village of Bondari outside the city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine. When he was fifteen years old he was taken as a prisoner of war after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in the Second World War in 1941. He later said : “The war had completely surprised us, I wasn’t able to flee”. 

In 1942, he was deported to Dortmund, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr valley, to work as forced labourer 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. Further moves saw him taken 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. It was in the last camp that he was liberated 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.

Now living in the Soviet Union he was enlisted to the Soviet army for five years service after the end of the War. In later years 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 April 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald by the US Army, he read out, in Russian, the oath taken by the camp’s survivors which ends with the words : 

“ The construction of a new world of peace and liberty is our goal”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-RNAILkJ_8&t=0m50s