Borys Romanchenko, a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, was killed in a Russian strike on Ukraine’s Kharkiv on Friday. His death was confirmed on Twitter by the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial institute. 

The memorial said that it was “stunned” by the news of his death, adding that the 96-year-old had survived the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dora, Bergen-Belsen and Peenemünde during the Second World War. 

Romanchenko’s granddaughter informed the memorial that he was living in an apartment facility that was attacked by the Russian forces in the city of Kharkiv. 

The memorial added that Romanchenko worked “intensively on the memory of Nazi crimes and was vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee.”

Discovered on April 11, 1945, Buchenwald started the liberation of over 21,000 prisoners from one of the biggest Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

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The official US military account of the liberation called the concentration camp “a symbol of the cold-blooded cruelty of the German Nazi state,” where thousands of prisoners were left in starvation and “others were burned, beaten, hung and shot to death.”

A decade ago, the Holocaust survivor delivered an oath of “creating a new world where peace and freedom reign” at an event that commemorated the liberation of Buchenwald.

In 2018, Romanchenko visited Buchenwald on the 73rd anniversary of the camp’s liberation by US forces, according to a local newspaper in Kharkiv. 

“The event was attended by the last surviving Buchenwald prisoners from Ukraine and Belarus — Borys Romanchenko from Kharkiv, Oleksandr Bychok from Kyiv and Andriy Moiseenko from Minsk,” the report said.

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Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, addressed the 96-year-old’s death on his Telegram handle. 

“This is what they call the ‘operation of denazification,” Yermak said, implying Russia’s justification of its invasion of Ukraine that it attempts to protect the country from Nazi elements.

Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, called Romanchenko’s death an “unspeakable crime” on his Twitter account.

“Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin,” Kuleba wrote.