Buchenwald Survivor Dies in Russian Attack

A 96-year-old Ukrainian who survived imprisonment in four concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust has been killed by a Russian attack on his home in the eastern city of Kharkiv. Boris Romantschenko died Friday during a Russian shelling of the neighborhood where he lived in an apartment building, his family said, per the BBC. "It is with horror that we report the violent death of Boris Romantschenko," said a statement on the website of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, of which he was vice president. The foundation said Romantschenko "worked intensely on the memory of Nazi crimes."

Romantschenko was born in northern Ukraine in 1926, per the Washington Post. After Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union, he was deported to Germany and forced into hard labor. He was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp after a failed escape attempt, and later to Mittelbau-Dora, originally part of Buchenwald, and Bergen Belsen. While at Peenemünde, he took part in the building of the V-2 Rocket. At Buchenwald alone, 56,545 people were killed. Romantschenko returned to commemorate the camp's liberation in 1945 by US troops. "We are stunned," the foundation said in a tweet. (More Holocaust survivor stories.)