(JTA) — A 96-year-old non-Jewish Holocaust survivor who lived through four different Nazi concentration camps was killed Friday in a Russian airstrike on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation announced Borys Romanchenko’s death on Twitter on Monday.
“Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin,” Ukraine’s foreign minister tweeted Monday.
Romanchenko’s former concentration camp uniform, which he wore through stints at the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen camps, featured a red triangle. That symbolized that he was likely either a political prisoner or a gentile who assisted Jews, among other non-Jewish categories.
Romanchenko was at one point vice president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee and worked “intensively on the memory of Nazi crimes,” the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora institute said. He attended multiple ceremonies that commemorated the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the Nazis’ largest death camps.
His granddaughter told the institute that he was at home when his building was hit by Russian fire.
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