Borys Tymofiyovych Romantschenko was born in 1926 to a farming family living in Bondari, a modest village in Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast, and it was there, amidst the wide fields, the meandering rivers, and the open heavens of picturesque Sumshchyna that he spent his formative years, together with his parents and two sisters. As a six-year-old, he survived the Holodomor. Ten years later, he would experience the horrors of the Holocaust. “The war had completely surprised us, I wasn’t able to flee,” he recalled in a 2004 interview. Taken into bondage alongside all the other adult males of his village, Borys was first sent to a coal mine outside Dortmund. He escaped, only to be recaptured and transferred to Buchenwald, where he was set to work in a quarry. In the terrible years to come he would find himself at Peenemünde, and then in the infernal bowels of the underground concentration camp at Mittelbau-Dora, followed by a death march to Bergen-Belsen. On April 15, 1945, British troops reached Bergen-Belsen, where they encountered 60,000 emaciated prisoners and 13,000 decomposing corpses. Borys Romantschenko was fortunate enough to be counted among the former.

It had been one more narrow escape for the 19-year-old Ukrainian farm boy, but his trials were not over. The Soviet authorities viewed anyone who emerged alive from the Nazi concentration camps as ideologically suspect, so Borys was obliged to prove his loyalty to the regime with a five-year stint in the Red Army. Only in 1950 did he arrive back home in northeastern Ukraine, where he found work as a typist while studying at night to earn a mining engineering degree. He would eventually return to his rural roots, in a way, by designing agricultural machinery. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that Borys felt comfortable discussing his wartime experiences. He gave talks at schools, he attended concentration camp commemorative events at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, and he served as the Ukrainian vice-president of the International Committee of Former Prisoners of Buchenwald-Dora. On April 12, 2015, Borys Romantschenko ventured back to Buchenwald once more, appearing at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Still hale and hearty despite his 89 years, Borys recited the Buchenwald Oath: Our ideal is to build a new world of peace and freedom. (READ MORE: The Gaza Blood Libel and Netanyahu’s Test To Come)

Borys Romantschenko retired to a single-bedroom apartment on the eighth floor of a housing block in Kharkiv’s Saltivka district, where he was cared for by his granddaughter Yulia, whom he had taught to read and write. He was hard of hearing, suffered from leg pain, and seldom left his room during the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 18, 2022, his building received a direct hit during a Russian artillery barrage. By the time Yulia Romantschenko arrived on the scene, the resulting fire had completely consumed the structure, and she found, in her words, that only his bones remained on the frame of the bed where he lay. Borys was 96 years old.

Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, reacted to Romantschenko’s death with indignation:

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.

On Nov. 9, 2022, the Leipzig City Council voted to rename the Turmgutstraße, along which the Russian Consulate is located, the Boris-Romantschenko-Straße. These gestures, however welcome, could not bring back Borys Romantschenko, nor the lost manuscript of his wartime recollections that he kept by his side, as an aide–mémoire, until the very end of his life.

*****

Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkova was born in 1930 in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. She was 10 years old in the autumn of 1941 when the Nazi death squads came. Some 16,000 Jews were executed on the outskirts of the city, including Vanda’s mother, though Vanda herself survived by hiding silently in her basement. She was later captured, but friends of her family managed to convince the Gestapo that the girl was of Greek rather than Jewish heritage, and she spent the remainder of the occupation convalescing in a hospital. Vanda would stay in Mariupol for the rest of her life. She married in 1954, and lived a quiet life, eventually moving in with her daughter Larissa. Vanda remained an active member of Mariupol’s Jewish community, and on May 13, 1998, she provided a full account of her wartime experiences to the USC Shoah Foundation. Her speech remained tinged with a hint of Yiddish for all the days of her long life.

When the Russians invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Mariupol was once again under a state of siege, and Vanda Obiedkova was once again hiding in her basement, just as she had done 81 years earlier. “Every time a bomb fell, the entire building shook,” Larissa later recounted, and “my mother kept saying she didn’t remember anything like this during the Great Patriotic War.” Shells and missiles continued to rain down on the martyred city, Russian snipers made trips for fresh water perilous, the electricity was cut off, the outside temperature was often below freezing, and food supplies petered out. Vanda grew increasingly frail, begged for water, and repeatedly asked her daughter “Why is this happening?” She succumbed to hunger, thirst, and exposure on April 4, 2022, at the age of ninety-one. Larissa and her husband risked life and limb to bury her in a public park overlooking the Sea of Azov and then fled their besieged home. “Mama loved Mariupol. She never wanted to leave,” Larissa told Chabad after reaching the relative safety of unoccupied Ukraine. But “Mama didn’t deserve such a death.”

*****

Gina Smiatich was born in 1933, survived the years of the Shoah and Israel’s existential wars of national survival, and like so many others she played her own small part in the communal endeavor of the Jewish people. At the age of 90, she was living in the Kibbutz Kissufim in the northwestern Negev desert, in the region of Eshkol, not far from the Gaza Strip. Edva Segal, who worked with Gina at the kibbutz’s Kolvo grocery store, spoke of a “beautiful woman inside and out, with an inexhaustible sense of humor, always smiling at everyone.” The kindly nonagenarian grew geraniums from all over the world in the small garden behind her small house and was known for bringing bouquets to her family, friends, and neighbors. (READ MORE: Stumbling Into World War III)

When dozens of Hamas terrorists breached the walls of Kissufim on Oct. 7, 2023, Gina sought shelter in a reinforced merhav mugan dirati safe room. She managed to call her grandson, Shmulik Harel, who later told reporters “We only spoke to her for a few seconds. She told us that she was hiding in the shelter at home and that she was scared.” Exactly what happened next may never be known. We are told that the Hamas butchers were calling out to the residents, pretending to be members of the Israeli Defense Forces. Perhaps Gina thought that help had arrived. But her neighbors, the Zaq family, were told by the attackers to exit their secure room, or else the house would be set on fire, so perhaps Gina felt compelled to leave her shelter rather than share the fate of Itai, Eti, and Guy Zaq, who all perished as their house burned to the ground. Perhaps an entirely different scenario played out. Whatever transpired on that day, forensic examinations have established that Gina Smiatich was dragged from her shelter, made to kneel in her living room, and was then executed with a shot to the head. Israeli forces found her body lying outside her home. She was 90 years old. Try, if you will, to imagine her last moments on this earth.

*****

Hanns Chaim Mayer was born in Vienna in 1912, the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and grew up in the alpine resort city of Hohenems, home to a once-flourishing Jewish community by then somewhat diminished by emigration. A natural scholar, he returned to Vienna as a student of literature and philosophy and thereupon began his training as a bookseller. In 1933 he resigned from the Jewish community, but reversed his decision in November 1937, on the eve of his marriage to Regine Berger-Baumgarten. The following year, in the wake of the Anschluß Österreichs, Hanns and Regine fled to Antwerp, only for Hanns to be arrested as a “German enemy alien” and sent to the Gurs internment camp in southwestern France. By the time he escaped and made his way back to Belgium, his adoptive country was under Nazi occupation. Hanns bravely joined the Résistance belge, only to be captured in the summer of 1943 and tortured in the Gestapo headquarters at Fort Breendonk. He was shackled, scourged with a horsewhip, and suspended from a ceiling hook. “There was a crackling and splintering in my shoulders,” he wrote decades afterward, “that my body has not forgotten until this hour.” Having managed not to provide any information about his comrades in the resistance movement, his status was “demoted” from political prisoner to Jew, and he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was assigned to a slave labor unit at the Monowitz-Buna sub-camp. Like Borys Romantschenko, Hanns Mayer was subsequently transferred to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he too was rescued on April 15, 1945. By the end of the month, he had arrived back home in Brussels, only to find that Regine had died of heart disease just five days earlier.

It was at this time that Hanns Mayer was reborn as Jean Améry, his new French surname an anagram of his old Germanic one. He would go on to produce some of the most profound essays of the twentieth century, including Geburt der Gegenwart: Gestalten und Gestaltungen der westlichen Zivilisation seit Kriegsende (1963), Über das Altern: Revolte und Resignation (1968), and Charles Bovary, Landarzt (1978). Yet only in 1964 did he begin to address his harrowing Holocaust experiences in print, at the urging of the poet Helmut Heißenbüttel. His first work on the subject was Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne, literally Beyond Guilt and Atonement — a play on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil — but translated into English in 1980 as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. For Améry, the evils of Auschwitz remained ever-present. “I do not have [clarity] today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history. My book is meant to prevent precisely this. For nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no remembering has become mere memory.” Jean Améry was not inclined to forgive and forget. “I preserved my resentments. And since I neither can nor want to get rid of them, I must live with them and am obliged to clarify them for those against whom they are directed.”

“What happened, happened,” that much was true, but “that it happened cannot be so easily accepted,” so Améry instead chose to “rebel: against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way.” For the rest of his life, from 1964 until his 1978 suicide in a Salzburg hotel room, Améry fought against the falsification of history. Otherwise “everything,” he worried, “will be submerged in a general ‘Century of Barbarism.‘ We, the victims, will appear as the truly incorrigible, irreconcilable ones, as the antihistorical reactionaries in the exact sense of the word, and in the end it will seem like a technical mishap that some of us still survived.” Améry had been imprisoned at Auschwitz III Buna Monowitz, a corporate concentration camp operated by the I.G. Farben chemical conglomerate, and it is appropriate that in Frankfurt am Main, affixed to the wall of the old I.G. Farben headquarters — now the home of Goethe University’s humanities departments — one can find a memorial plaque bearing the Vienna-born essayist’s immortal words: “None of us can withdraw from the history of our people. The past should and must not ‘be allowed to rest,’ otherwise it can rise up again and could become the new present.” (READ MORE by Matthew Omolesky: The Cohesion of Error: Russia’s Rationales for War)

Jean Améry, formerly Hanns Chaim Mayer, was a staunch Zionist. Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno proposed, rather vaguely, that after the destruction of the European Jewry “Mankind has to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen,” Améry knew from personal experience that Mankind’s thoughts are not easily arranged. Améry opted to put his faith in Israel, with the understanding that if the Jewish State were to be wiped out it would “leave her inhabitants nothing left but the butcher knife of the enemy.” In a 1969 contribution to Hamburg’s weekly Die Zeit, he asserted that “anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm.” Elsewhere, in powerful articles like “The New Left’s Approach to ‘Zionism,’” “Jews, Leftists, Leftist Jews: The Changing Contours of a Political Problem,” and “The New Antisemitism,” he examined how “anti-Zionism is nothing else than the update of the age-old, ineradicable, completely irrational Jew-hatred, and that anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist is either too stupid to see that he engages in the realization of a new Auschwitz or he consciously aims at this new Auschwitz.” 

There is a reason that more than 800 Holocaust-related organizations have been established all over the world. There is a reason that researchers continue their search for mass burial sites in the lonely fields and forests of Eastern Europe’s bloodlands where millions of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust by bullets. There is a reason that the survivors of Buchenwald met to recite their famous oath for as long as they were able. There is a reason that the state of Israel, the national home of the Jewish people, exists in the first place. 

There is a reason, we might add, that Ukrainians and members of the Ukrainian diaspora erect memorial crosses and monuments and barrows of sorrow in memory of the victims of the Holodomor, and place lit candles in their windows on Holodomor Remembrance Day. There is a reason that the French have left the village of Oradour-sur-Glane untouched since its total destruction by a Waffen-SS company on June 10, 1944. There is a reason the Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide has held annual remembrance ceremonies since 2002. There is a reason that the Cambodian government maintains the Choeung Ek memorial, with its macabre stupa of five thousand skulls, a haunting reminder of the 1.7 million men, women, and children murdered during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. There is a reason that Rwanda established the Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi, where 250,000 victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi are laid to rest.

That reason is not what Améry called “mere memory.” The past, particularly that of the genocidal Century of Barbarism, had not been interred in these various lieux de mémoire, though a great many victims might be. The past itself is meant to be kept alive in these places so that we might act accordingly, and prevent the horrors visited on our forebears from re-emerging and becoming the new present. The long lives of Borys Romantschenko, Vanda Obiedkova, and Gina Smiatich bore witness to that barbarous century. That they still met their ends as a consequence of eliminationist violence is a searing indictment of our own. 

Jean Améry could not help but possess, in his words, “the moral truth of the blows that even today roar in my skull,” a haunting turn of phrase that reminds me of Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poem “On the Slaughter,” written in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which includes the lines:

וְכָל–הָאָרֶץ לִי גַרְדֹּם –

וַאֲנַחְנוּ – אֲנַחְנוּ הַמְעָט!

דָּמִי מֻתָּר – הַךְ קָדְקֹד, וִיזַנֵּק דַּם רֶצַח,

דַּם יוֹנֵק וָשָׂב עַל–כֻּתָּנְתְּךָ –

וְלֹא יִמַּח לָנֶצַח, לָנֶצַח.

וְאִם יֶשׁ–צֶדֶק – יוֹפַע מִיָּד!

[…]

וְיִקֹּב הַדָּם אֶת–הַתְּהוֹם!

יִקֹּב הַדָּם עַד תְּהֹמוֹת מַחֲשַׁכִּים,

וְאָכַל בַּחֹשֶׁךְ וְחָתַר שָׁם

כָּל–מוֹסְדוֹת הָאָרֶץ הַנְּמַקִּים.

All the world’s a butchering block,
And we, we are the few.
Our blood is fair game, so strike the skull, spraying
The blood of newborns and elders on your clothing,
Never, no never to be wiped away.
And if there is justice, let it come now!
[…]
And let the blood pierce through the abyss,
Let it seep down to the darkest depths,
And eat away there, in the dark,
And breach all the rotting foundations of the earth.

Memory is vital. Memory prevents all the bloodshed and bloodbaths and blood libels from ever being wiped away, or “placed in the files of history,” or “in the cold storage of history.” But “mere memory” is insufficient, as Jean Améry demonstrated, if “nothing is resolved, if nothing is settled,” if justice is not done.