Concentration camp survivor reportedly killed in Ukraine

A Ukrainian survivor of the Nazi concentration camps has reportedly died in his home city of Kharkiv after a projectile hit the building where he lived.

Boris Romantschenko, a survivor of the camps in Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen, died at the age of 96, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation announced.

The foundation wrote on Twitter that the building where Romantschenko lived was bombed.

“Last Friday a Russian bomb hit his house and killed him. Unspeakable crime. Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Monday.

According to the foundation, Romantschenko was heavily involved in maintaining the history of what happened at the Nazi concentration camps. The organization shared a photo of Romantschenko in 2012 reading the Buchenwald oath during an anniversary celebration of the liberation of the camp.

Kharkiv — a city of about 1.5 million people — is among the Ukrainian cities hardest hit by Russia’s invasion, being only 15 miles from the Russian border. The city has been bombarded with guided missiles and rockets in the weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his attack.

When Russia crossed into Ukraine, Putin claimed that he was doing so in order to fight neo-Nazis and “denazify” the country, though international observers have decried such the claim, condemning it as a fabricated pretext for invasion.

Margarita Morozova, a Kharkiv resident who lived through the siege of Leningrad during WWII, told Reuters in an interview published on Sunday that she never could have imagined living through another war.

“In my childhood I hid from bombardments in the corridor. We took shelter in old buildings. And it is the same now,” she told the newswire.