Weimar city honours Holocaust survivor killed in Ukraine

Admin l Saturday, March 18, 2023

 

WEIMER – The German city of Weimar paid tribute on Saturday to Borys Romanchenko, a Ukrainian Holocaust survivor who was killed at the age 96 by a Russian strike in Ukraine one year ago.

Romanchenko survived the atrocities of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps at Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen during World War II, according to the Buchenwald Memorial, adding that he had become a Holocaust activist and “worked intensively on the memory of Nazi crimes.”

He died on March 18, 2022, when Russian missiles hit his flat in a multi-story building in the war-ravaged eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, according to his family.

To mark the anniversary, a memorial service was held in Weimar, near the Buchenwald concentration camp, in the state of Thuringia.

The city said people gathered at a large portrait of Romanchenko in front of the state administration office, including Thuringia’s Minister of Migration and Justice Doreen Denstädt.

Weimar’s Mayor Peter Kleine said: “Borys Romanchenko’s death shows how perfidious Russia’s war against Ukraine is.”

Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau from the Buchenwald Memorial said thousands of survivors of the Nazi horrors still live in Ukraine today, often in precarious conditions and lacking electricity, food and medicine.

Together with other memorials, museums and various initiatives and associations, the Buchenwald Memorial has launched a sponsorship programme for Holocaust survivors in Ukraine.

“With our aid network, we have been able to support more than 18,000 survivors with emergency financial aid or relief supplies,” said Lüttgenau, emphasizing that more donations were needed.