His name was Boris Romantschenko.
Aged 96, this survivor of the Holocaust, was killed on March 18 in Kharkiv, in the north-east of Ukraine by Russian strikes which partially destroyed the building where he lived.
“He survived in Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Peenemünde and Bergen-Belsen, in the death camps erected by Hitler's partisans.
And now he has been killed by a Russian bombardment that hit an ordinary building in Kharkiv,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video posted Monday evening on Telegram.
"Every day of this war shows more clearly what 'denazification' is for them (the Russians)," he further denounced.
From the start, Russian President Vladimir Putin has constantly justified his invasion of Ukraine by the “need to denazify” this country… A propaganda argument denounced and condemned by the entire international community.
Besieged by Russian forces since the start of the invasion on February 24, the city of Kharkiv has since been the target of several deadly strikes targeting civilian homes in particular.
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Romantschenko, he had lived alone on the 8th floor of a building in the city for several years.
This survivor of the death camps had dedicated his life to exposing Nazi crimes.
In 1942, he was deported to Germany at the age of 16, as a forced laborer.
It was after an escape attempt that he was sent to the Buchenwald camp a year later.
He was then interned in Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora and then Bergen-Belsen.
Present at a commemoration ceremony marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald camp in 2012, Boris Romantschenko read Buchenwald's oath there: "The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal". .
Four days after the bombing of his apartment, employees of the Kharkiv City Hall came to collect his remains.
In the room where Romantschenko was, only ashes and bones remained.
The fire caused by the strikes consumed everything.
Respectfully, they picked up as many bones as possible and carefully placed them in a black body bag.
Remains which were then deposited in the morgue of Kharkiv.
"Boris Romantschenko's horrific death shows how much of a threat the war in Ukraine is to concentration camp survivors," said the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.
She estimates that 42,000 survivors of Nazi persecution currently live in Ukraine.