Sarajevo – Survivors at both the Auschwitz death camp and the Sarajevo siege in the 1990s have died, representatives of Bosnia’s Jewish community confirmed Tuesday.
Members of Sarajevo’s Jewish community told AFP that Greta Weinfeld Ferusic died on Monday at the age of 97.
Born in northern Serbia in 1924, Ferusic was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 along with several family members who were later murdered in the camp in Poland. She was the only survivor of her family.
After the end of World War II, she returned to Serbia, studied architecture in Belgrade and later moved to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
He worked as a professor in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Sarajevo, rising through the academic ranks to become the school’s dean.
But in the midst of the violent division of Yugoslavia, Ferrucci was again caught in the fire of war.
Greta Ferrucci Weinfeld – 14 years old when she was sent to her parents, two aunts and an uncle #auschwitz75, he was the only member of his family to survive. she lives in #sarajevo # Holocaust Remembrance Day pic.twitter.com/njSif5pdwa
— Dunja Mijatovic (@Dunja_Mijatovic) January 27, 2020
During Bosnia’s 1992–1995 War, Ferusic refused to evacuate as Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo, which became a one-year siege where an estimated 11,000 people, including 1600 children, perished.
“During the Second World War, the whole of Europe was in trouble and suffering … (during the Bosnia war) people lived a normal life unaffected by events as the crow flew only 100 kilometers away and did not see what was happening here were,” he later said of the siege.
In a message posted to Facebook, Haris Pasovic, who directed a documentary on Ferusic, said: “A brilliant man is gone … he has survived many good and terrible things.”
document – “Greta” – tells the story of Ferusic’s theatrical life and was later screened during several international film festivals after its 1997 release.
In the film, Ferusic tells of his decision to stay in Sarajevo amid the siege.
“Early in my life I was forced to leave my house. I will never again voluntarily leave my house,” she said.
In 2004, Ferusic was awarded the Auschwitz Cross – a Polish decoration honoring survivors of Nazi concentration camps.
The Holocaust saw the massacre of six million European Jews by the Nazis and their supporters between 1939 and 1945.