He escaped alive from the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald. And Dora-Mittelbau. And Bergen-Belsen.
But on Friday, 96-year-old Holocaust survivor Baris Romanshenko was not rescued alive when his apartment building in Kharkov was hit by Russian artillery.
“It is with great horror that we announce the death of Baris Romanshenko in the war in Ukraine,” the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation said in a press release yesterday, explaining that it had been informed by his granddaughter.
The apartment building where he lived “was hit by shells and caught fire,” he explained. “His apartment burned down,” the foundation continued, expressing its grief over the death of this “close friend.”
Ukraine’s second largest city has been bombed by Russian artillery almost continuously since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, which Russian President Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation” necessary to disarm and “de-Naziize” country.
“Every day of this war it becomes more obvious what ‘de-Naziization’ means to ‘them’,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said of the Russian president and the Russian army.
“Putin ‘achieved’ what Hitler had not achieved,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Baris Romanshenko was born on January 20, 1926 in Bondari, near Sumy, according to a statement from the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial.
He was deported to Dortmund in 1942, at the age of 16, to work in a mine. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape, he was sent to the Buchenwald camp in 1943.
More than 53,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis at the Buchenwald concentration and extermination camp during World War II.
He was then transferred to Peenemunde, on the island of Uzentom in the Baltic Sea, where he was forced to work on the Nazi V2 missile program, and was also held in the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
“The horrific death of Baris Romanshenko shows how great a threat the war in Ukraine is for Holocaust survivors,” which today stands at an estimated 42,000, the foundation said.
The former detainee in the Nazi concentration camps was vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Commission in Ukraine. Dedicated to the detailed recording of Nazi crimes.
Before returning to Ukraine, he served in the Soviet Army for years, stationed in what was once East Germany, according to Maximilian Kolbe, a organization dedicated to providing material and psychological support to Holocaust survivors.
The group had been in contact for years with Romanshenko, who was ill and had difficulty even getting out of the apartment where he lived alone, on the eighth floor of an apartment building in Kharkov that was bombed on Friday, her colleague told AFP.
In 2012, at an event marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp, Baris Romanshenko recalled the Nazi camp’s survivors’ oath: “Our ideal is to build a new world of peace and freedom.”
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