The memorial said Romanchenko survived the camps at Buchenwald, Peenemunde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen during World War II, adding that he was “shocked” by the news of his death.
She said Romanchenko “worked extensively on the memory of Nazi crimes and was deputy head of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee”.
Yulia Romanchenko, Boris’s granddaughter, told CNN that she “learned about the bombing of the Saltivka residential neighborhood on March 18 from social media. I asked locals if they knew anything about my grandfather’s house. They sent me a video of a burning house. I found out after a curfew.” So I couldn’t go there right away.”
By the time Yulia managed to get to the area, she found her grandfather’s house “completely burned – there were no windows, no balcony, nothing in his apartment.”
Buchenwald’s discovery, on April 11, 1945, began the liberation of more than 21,000 prisoners from one of the largest Nazi concentration camps of World War II.
The official US military version of the liberation described the camp as “a symbol of the cold brutality of the German Nazi state”, where thousands of political prisoners starved and “others were burned, beaten, hanged, and shot to death”.
In 2012, Romanchenko attended an event commemorating Buchenwald’s liberation, where he read a section dedicated to “creating a new world in which peace and freedom reign,” according to the monument.
In 2018, the Kharkiv newspaper reported on his visit to Buchenwald on the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the camp by US forces.
“The event was attended by the last surviving prisoners of Buchenwald from Ukraine and Belarus – Boris Romanchenko from Kharkiv, Alexander Petchuk from Kyiv and Andrei Moiseenko from Minsk,” the report stated.
Andrei Yermak, head of the office of the President of Ukraine, spoke about the death of Romanchenko on his account on Telegram.
“This is what they call ‘Operation De-Nazification’,” he said, referring to Russia’s claim that its invasion of Ukraine was aimed at saving the country from Nazi elements.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba described Romanchenko’s murder as an “unspeakable crime” on Twitter.
“Hitler survived and Putin killed him,” he wrote.
Ukrainian officials said Monday that the northeastern city of Kharkiv has been subjected to massive missile and missile attacks since the start of the Russian invasion, but it has not yet been completely besieged.
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