Ukrainian Holocaust survivor Boris Romantschenko aged 96 was killed when Russian shells hit his flat in an attack on his home town of Kharkiv on Friday. During a stay at the Auschwitz Memorial, Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee said:

“For Auschwitz survivors and survivors of the Holocaust, the death of their companion and fellow sufferer in Nazi concentration camps, Boris Romantschenko, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, has sounded the final rallying cry in a criminal war that Putin and his cronies are waging in Ukraine day in, day out. This war is trampling the memories and the life’s work of the survivors, and it is trying to divide and destroy the community of the survivors in Ukraine, in Poland, in Russia, in Belarus, in Israel and in many other countries throughout the world.”

And in Budapest Eva Fahidi, the Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who is also 96, added: “Everything that we have lived for since our liberation from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen and over the past decades, what we have stood up for, and why we have shared our memories with young people in Europe – Putin and his generals are dishonouring all of this. People always said that we, the survivors of the camps, are the conscience of the world. Putin has no conscience, he has nothing at all to do with us, shame on him and on his lies. Our thoughts in these days go to the family of Boris Romantschenko and all of the survivors of the Holocaust in Ukraine, who are fearing for their lives beneath the Russian bombs. But our thoughts also go to the parents and loved ones of the young Russian soldiers whose lives Putin is wilfully squandering in this war where they have fallen.”

Christoph Heubner, co-founder of the International Youth Meeting Center in Auschwitz, concluded by emphasizing that Holocaust survivors and their families who are fleeing from Ukraine and Putin’s bombs can find refuge and safety at the International Youth Meeting Center in Oswiecim/Auschwitz, Poland. “They are welcome and will be kept safe – in this place of all places, the name of which until now was associated with the greatest imaginable threat to their lives and those of their families.”