Greta Ferušić

Greta Ferušić Weinfeld (26 June 1924 – 23 January 2022) was a Bosnian professor & dean of architecture at the University of Sarajevo. She was the only Bosnian woman to survive Auschwitz and the only person in the world to survive both Auschwitz and the Siege of Sarajevo.

Biography

Ferušić was born and raised in Novi Sad (now in Vojvodina, Serbia), to a wealthy Bosnian Jewish family. She was 19 years old when she, her parents, two aunts, and an uncle were sent in April 1944 to Auschwitz. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, she weighed . She was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.

After the Holocaust

After the war, she returned to Yugoslavia and started studying Architecture in Belgrade, then later in Paris. In Belgrade she married Seid Ferušić, a secular Bosniak, and moved to town of Sarajevo in 1952. She applied to be a teaching assistant at the University of Sarajevo where she also continued her studies. She later became the first woman to graduate there.

Siege of Sarajevo

Refusing to be dislocated when the siege of Sarajevo began in April 1992, Greta and her husband did not evacuate, but insisted that her son, his wife, and their children leave the city

In February 2004, Ferušić was awarded the Polish Auschwitz Cross (Krzyż Oświęcimski), a Polish decoration awarded to honour survivors of Nazi concentration camps. She was the last person to receive this medal.

Greta

In 1997, Haris Pašović produced and directed a biographical film, Greta, about her. The film producers received a grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to transform it from a video format to a professional 35mm film format. The film has been shown in different film festivals, such as Avignon, New York, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Rome, Stockholm, Sarajevo, Ljubljana and others.

Personal life

In 1948, she married her university classmate Seid, a Bosnian Muslim, and they settled in Sarajevo and had a son. Her husband died in 2007. Ferušić died at her residence in Sarajevo on 23 January 2022, at the age of 97.