Darkness is falling over Germany – for weeks the media have been preparing the public for the effects of the energy crisis with similar headlines.

The linguistic picture is correct: sharply rising energy costs as a result of Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine are forcing austerity measures such as the general reduction in electricity, light and energy in every form.

At the same time, the darkness cited by the media, which threatens to descend on Germany, points to the existential misery that could affect millions of people.

For the Jewish minority, the metaphor of dark times approaching awakens another association.

For us Jews, it is an alarm signal that conjures up old fears.

In recent German history, the concept of darkness is inextricably linked to German-Jewish history.

Germany's dark past, the dark chapters of German history: for decades, both have been common paraphrases for the twelve years of the unjust National Socialist regime, for a war started by Germany and the murder of six million Jews.

Horror, terror, deportation, death

It was also pitch black 84 years ago when, late in the evening after dark, the Nazi henchmen set out to mistreat and terrorize the Jewish population.

Shortly thereafter, the horror of the night was omnipresent and visible.

High flames erupted from the synagogues.

Torah scrolls, furniture and household goods shattered in the streets.

Scantily clad Jews chased out of their homes waited outside.

Almost all of them were robbed, many hundreds were deported, and the Jewish Germans as a whole were deeply humiliated.

At daybreak, columns of black smoke, destroyed synagogues, mountains of broken glass, terrorized Jewish people and a sea of ​​tears announced all over the country about the inhuman crimes that have gone unpunished under cover of darkness.

The long, dark shadows of National Socialist terror are now catching up with Germany again in the winter of 2022.

The news of the death of Boris Romantschenko, the ninety-six-year-old former vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee, brought the fate of the Ukrainian concentration camp survivors into the focus of reporting, at least for a short time.

His fate represents that of thousands of victims: at the age of sixteen he was abducted to Germany to do forced labor, after a failed attempt to escape he suffered through the Buchenwald concentration camp and was later interned in Peenemünde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen.

At the time of his liberation in 1945, the now nineteen-year-old weighed just 39 kilograms.

Until 1950, Boris Romantschenko served in the Soviet Army in East Germany.

Back home, he studied at the Kharkiv Mining Academy and later worked as a senior engineer.

On March 17, 2022, the important voice of the Buchenwald Committee fell silent when a Russian bomb destroyed Boris Romanchenko's home on the outskirts of Kharkiv.