'Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin': World War II Holocaust survivor killed in Ukraine's Kharkiv

New Delhi: Boris Romanchenko, who survived the Nazi Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II, has been killed after Russian shelling hit his flat in the war-ravaged Ukrainian city of Kharkiv last week, the memorial for the Buchenwald survivors said on Monday (March 22).

The 96-year-old Holocaust survivor had also survived the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in the same war and then the Bergen-Belsen camp.

"It is with horror that we report the violent death of Boris Romanchenko in the war in Ukraine," the memorial for the Buchenwald survivors said in a statement.

"The multi-storey apartment building where Romanchenko lived was shelled and caught on fire," the statement added.

"The horrific death of Boris Romanchenko shows how threatening the war in Ukraine is for the concentration camp survivors," the memorial said.

Reacting to the news, Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba hit out at Russian President Vladimir Putin and said that it is an 'unspeakable crime'.

"Unspeakable crime. Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin," Kuleba tweeted.

Borys Romanchenko, 96, survived four Nazi concentration camps: Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen. He lived his quiet life in Kharkiv until recently. Last Friday a Russian bomb hit his house and killed him. Unspeakable crime. Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin. pic.twitter.com/QYJ4xrNYC9

— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) March 21, 2022

"Putin managed to `accomplish` what even Hitler couldn`t," Ukraine's Defence Ministry said.

Kharkiv, Ukraine`s second-largest city, has been under heavy fire from Russian artillery throughout the invasion, which Putin calls a "special military operation" necessary to disarm and "denazify" its neighbour.

"Please think about how many things he has come through," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said late on Monday.

"But [he] was killed by a Russian strike, which hit an ordinary Kharkiv multi-storey building. With each day of this war, it becomes more obvious what denazification means to them," Zelenskiy added.

Romanchenko was born on January 20, 1926, in Bondari, near the city of Sumy according to the statement from the Buchenwald memorial. He was deported to Dortmund in 1942, where he had to do forced mining labour. After an unsuccessful escape attempt, he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943, where more than 53,000 people were killed during World War II.

(With agency inputs)