96-year-old Holocaust survivor killed

ORIS Romantschenko, who survived four Nazi concentration camps during World War II, was killed by Russian shelling that struck his flat in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the Buchenwald Memorial foundation said on Monday. He was 96 years old.

Romantschenko died at home on March 18, after his building was bombed in the heavily shelled eastern city, the statement said, citing information from his son and granddaughter.

Describing him as “a close friend”, the foundation said Romantschenko was committed to educating others about the horrors of the Nazi era, and had been vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.

Romantschenko was born into a family of farmers in Bondari, near the Ukrainian city of Sumy, on January 20, 1926.

Although he was not Jewish, he was taken by German soldiers when he was 16 years old and deported to the German city of Dortmund in 1942 to work as a forced labourer, as part of Nazi intimidation tactics against the Ukrainian population at the time.

A failed escape attempt landed him in the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943. He also spent time in the camps of Peenemuende, where he was forced to help build V2 rockets, in Mittelbau-Dora, and in Bergen-Belsen.

“This is what they call the ‘operation of denazification,'” said the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s widely discredited claim that ridding Ukraine of supposed Nazis was a key reason for Moscow’s invasion.

There are still approximately 42,000 survivors of Nazi crimes living in Ukraine, according to the aid network.

Some 4000 Ukrainians have immigrated to Israel since Russia invaded last month, while Israeli government officials have said up to 100,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union may reach Israel’s shores in the wake of the invasion.

Meanwhile, Israel’s field hospital in western Ukraine welcomed its first patients on Tuesday.

TIMES OF ISRAEL, AFP

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