3/22/2022

9 Responses to “Man Survived Holocaust, But Not Putin”

1. The one consolation is that Putin’s name will go down in history alongside Hitler and Stalin — and maybe the people who touted him as the antidote to “American liberalism” will feel a bit of chagrin.

   Radegunda (56bf80) — 3/22/2022 @ 9:27 am

   
   

2. Putin’s name will go down in history alongside Hitler and Stalin

   Maybe to his fans. I’d rank him below Mussolini (who at least invented Fascism). Il Duce also did okay when his tanks faced Ethiopians with spears*, but got wiped out when he faced Greeks with Mannlicher Schoenaurs.

   *I like that Putin’s tanks are now facing American … Javelins.

   nk (1d9030) — 3/22/2022 @ 9:49 am

   
   

3. I’d rank him below Mussolini

   Somewhere between Franco and Somoza.

   Kevin M (38e250) — 3/22/2022 @ 10:15 am

   
   

4. Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch calls for the “eradication” of the Ukraine “threat.”

   https://finance.yahoo.com/news/putin-holy-man-pushed-eradication-084250951.html

   “We have entered into a conflict which has not only physical but also metaphysical significance. We are talking about human salvation, something much more important than politics.”

   The Ukrainians are sinners and the sin must be stamped out of them.

   Kevin M (38e250) — 3/22/2022 @ 2:45 pm

   
   

5. I’m curious how he wound up living in Kharkov. I don’t think Jews from that area were taken to concentration camps — there were no ghettos — they were simply killed I think.

   I suspect he was born in eastern Poland, the part that was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 (ratified by the Yalta agreement, with minor border modifications made in 1951)

   He must have become a Soviet citizen but still was in the western when he was liberated. He must have gone back east to search for any surviving family. (I would like to verify that but it’s hard to find something about him written before this week)

   How did he settle in Kharkov?

   Ah here (using Bing)

   He was born in Eastern Ukraine.

   https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-who-boris-romanchenko-96-year-old-holocaust-survivor-killed-russian-shelling-kharkhiv-ukraine#:~:text=Boris%20Romanchenko%20was%20born%20in%201926%20to%20a,he%20was%20forced%20to%20work%20as%20a%20miner. Caption to picture

   Boris Romanchenko was born in 1926 to a farming family in Bondari, a small village in east Ukraine (Image via Twitter/ @DefenceU)

   Also:

   Boris Romanchenko was born in 1926 to a farming family in Bondari, a small village in East Ukraine that was occupied by Germany during Operation Barbarossa.

   In 1942, he was deported to Dortmund, in the industrial Ruhr valley of Germany, where he was forced to work as a miner. In January 1943, after attempting to escape, he was caught just before he was about to board an east-bound train. He was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp.

   I think he was n=xt identified as Jewish by the Nazis.

   Now all people – had to have identity cards in Stalin’s Soviet Union — which contained aspace for “nationslity” of which Jewish was an option – the Soviet Union considered nationality to be mostly native tongue. A person with two parents of different nationality could pick one.

   Except that people who lived ion collective farms who were not issued them so they would have to stay on the farm. They were literally almost serfs

   Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 3/22/2022 @ 2:58 pm

   
   

6. Here is more:

   https://www.breakinglatest.news/world/ukrainian-russian-war-boris-romanchenko-died-in-kharkiv-he-had-survived-buchenwald

   Boris Romanchenko, 96, who died in Kharkiv, was considered by the Nazis a Ukrainian political prisoner as a Soviet “communist”, a survivor of the concentration camps, and was vice-president for Ukraine of IKBD, the International Committee of Labor Camp Survivors ( Kommando) by Buchenwald and Dora, according to the memorial site…

   …Born on January 20, 1926 in Bondari, near Sumy, he was captured by the Germans in 1942 and interned in Dortmund as a prisoner of war. He managed to escape but was recaptured, deported to Buchenwald and forced to forced labor in October 1943. For a time he was forced to collaborate with the Germans in the construction of the V2 ballistic missiles at the Peenemuende base, then transferred to the concentration camps of Mittelbau. -Dora and Bergen-Belsen.

   After the war, he helped establish an aid network for former victims of the Nazi persecution in Ukraine. He participated in numerous commemorations of the Holocaust and Nazi persecutions, in which he wore the striped uniform with the red triangle sewn that distinguished political internees (like the yellow Star of David distinguished Jews, the yellow and red Star of David ” political Jews ”, the brown triangle for Roma and Sinti, the pink one for homosexuals, the violet one for Jehovah’s Witnesses and the black one for“ anti-social ”).

   The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Foundation expressed “horror” at the news and recalled how in 2012 Romanchenko read the oath of the survivors of Buchenwald, which reads: “Building a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal!”

   I don’t see anything here to say he was Jewish.

   If he was not Jewish, he was not truly a “Holocaust survivor” just a prisoner in the same camp where Jews were imprisoned along with other categories of people — but each category was treated differently. Jews were treated the worst.

   Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 3/22/2022 @ 3:04 pm

   
   

7. Habre – Montt
   A couple of Military Dick-tators.

   mg (8cbc69) — 3/22/2022 @ 3:08 pm

   
   

8. Still, he was in a slave labor camp and held by the Nazis.

   Also, he was very involved by this point when there are few survivors of the concdntration camps left, in memorializing Bergen Belsen.

   And Putin (and Russia) talks about everything the Nazis did.

   Sammy Finkelman (02a146) — 3/22/2022 @ 3:08 pm

   
   

9. “Romanchenko survived the camps at… Peenemünde, Dora…”

   Slave Labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen [Dora]

   https://wsmrmuseum.com/2020/07/27/von-braun-the-v-2-and-slave-labor/4/?msclkid=6d9b4cecaa3311ec82fae9df3fccc46e

   This is the dark side of the moon; the ‘Faustian Bargain’ the U.S. made… and kept hidden from most Americans for decades…

   FWIW, Arthur Rudolph, who would manage NASA’s Saturn V development program in the United States under Von Braun, “was one of the 130 V-2 rocket engineers brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip, working at White Sands Proving Ground. He later moved to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and worked for the U.S. Army on the Pershing missile program before joining his colleagues at NASA and becoming the Project Director for the Saturn V rocket program. Retired and living in California in 1984, his past eventually caught up with him and he was forced to leave the U.S. to avoid a war crimes trial.’ Von Braun died in 1977– but had he lived, he’d likely have been outted in the 80’s as Rudolph was.

   DCSCA (f4c5e5) — 3/22/2022 @ 4:14 pm