Ukraine Foreign Minister on death of Holocaust survivor
Categories: FOREIGN COUNTRIES
After surviving four Nazi concentration camps, 96-year-old Borys Romanchenko was killed in Ukraine's Kharkiv after Russian shelling hit his apartment last Friday. Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba took to Twitter to share the news, and accused Russia of 'unspeakable crime'.He said, "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." Born in 1926 in Bondari, near the city of Sumy in northern Ukraine, Romantschenko was deported to the German city of Dortmund in 1942, where he became a forced labourer, according to the Buchenwald foundation. After a failed bid to escape, he was captured and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar in central Germany, in January 1943. "He would later be sent to Peenemünde, a military research centre, where he participated in the construction of the V-2 Rocket, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile. Other places he was detained included Mittelbau-Dora, originally an appendage of Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany that started out as a site holding prisoners of war and in 1943 became a concentration camp," The Washington Post reported.The death of Borys Romanchenko comes as the conflict continues for more than three weeks since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.