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96-year-old Holocaust survivor Boris Romanchenko was killed on March 18 by a Russian strike on Kharkiv, Ukraine.
The news of his death was confirmed by the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial institute on their Twitter handle.
A memorial for Romanchenko said he survived Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen camps during World War II, stating that they were "stunned" by his death.
Moreover, it stated that Romanchenko worked intensively for the memory of Nazi crimes and was Vice-President of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.
On March 18, Yulia Romanchenko, the granddaughter of Boris, learned of the shelling of the Saltivka residential district on social networks.
"I asked locals if they knew anything about my grandfather's house. They sent me a video of a burning house. I found out about this after the curfew and therefore I could not go there immediately."
Yulia discovered that her grandfather's home burned down when she arrived in the area - there were no windows, no balcony, and nothing inside his apartment.
Brief information about Boris Romanchenko
Boris Romanchenko was born in 1926 to a farming family in Bondari, a small village in East Ukraine that was occupied by Germany during Operation Barbarossa.
In 1942, he was deported to Dortmund, in the industrial Ruhr valley of Germany, where he was forced to work as a miner. In January 1943, after attempting to escape, he was caught just before he was about to board an east-bound train. He was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp.
Eventually, Romanchenko was transferred to Peenemünde, a Baltic Sea island, where he worked on the V2 rocket program as well as Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.
Upon finding Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, 21,000 prisoners were liberated from one of the largest Nazi concentration camps of World War II by the British and American allied forces.
According to official US military accounts of the liberation, the camp was a monument to the chilling cruelty of Nazi Germany, with thousands of political prisoners being starved, and others being burned, beaten, hung and shot to death.
In 2012, Romanchenko participated in an event commemorating the liberation of Buchenwald, where he read an oath promising to create a world where peace and freedom reign, according to the memorial.
In 2018, a Kharkiv newspaper reported on his visit to Buchenwald on the 73rd anniversary of its liberation by US forces. The report said:
"The event was attended by the last surviving Buchenwald prisoners from Ukraine and Belarus - Boris Romanchenko from Kharkiv, Oleksandr Bychok from Kyiv and Andriy Moiseenko from Minsk."
Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, wrote about Romanchenko's death on his Telegram account. While alluding to Russia's claim that the ongoing conflict with Ukraine is designed to save the latter country from Nazi elements, he said:
"This is what they call the 'operation of denazification.'"
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, called the death of Boris Romanchenko an "unspeakable crime" on Twitter.
The northeastern city of Kharkiv has been the target of heavy rocket and missile attacks since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, but it has not been fully surrounded yet, Ukrainian officials said on March 21.
