Nazi concentration camp survivor reported dead in Ukraine's Kharkiv

A man who survived the concentration camps of World War II has been killed in a bomb attack decades later in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, according to a German-based foundation.
Boris Romanchenko, 96, was killed on Friday during an attack on the apartment block where he lives, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-DoraMemorials Foundation said in a statement.
Memorial site director Jens-Christian Wagner said on Monday that the report on Romanchenko's death was based on information from a long-standing acquaintance of the foundation.
Casualties have been difficult to verify in Ukraine due to poor access to contested areas such as Kharkiv.
"We are mourning the loss of a close friend," the memorial foundation said in a statement.
Romanchenko survived internment at the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen.
After World War II, he became a vocal advocate for remembering Nazi war crimes and took on the role of vice president of the International Committee Buchenwald-Dora. Since the 1990s, he had regularly attended events at the site of the former concentration camp near Weimar, Wagner said.
Prior to his death, Romanchenko is said to have not left his flat in Kharkiv for months for fear of contracting the coronavirus. On Friday, a missile struck the building and set it on fire.
"The horrific death of Boris Romanchenko shows how threatening the war in Ukraine is also for concentration camp survivors," the statement said.
Together with 30 other memorial sites, the foundation has founded a support network for former victims of Nazi persecution in Ukraine.
Wagner had already expressed his concern for the Holocaust survivors living there at the beginning of the war in Ukraine.
The crisis was "particularly tragic for the Ukrainian concentration camp survivors who suffered with the Russian prisoners in the camps and who are now sitting in the air-raid shelter and are risking death by Russian bombs," he said at the time.
Russia has claimed that one of the goals of its war of aggression is to "denazify" Ukraine - something that has been roundly rejected as a falsehood.