Greta Ferušić
Greta Ferušić Weinfeld 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, 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. After graduation, she became a professor at the Faculty of Architecture. Later she was promoted to dean of Architecture and directed various architectural projects in the republic of Yugoslavia.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 when a special convoy evacuating the Jews of the city was organized on 15 November, 1992, by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She was interviewed for the Bosnian TV channel Hayat TV in 1994 for a documentary called Od Auscwitza do Sarajeva.In February 2004, Ferušić was awarded the Polish Auschwitz Cross, a Polish decoration awarded to honour survivors of Nazi concentration camps. She was the last person to receive this medal.