Jewish-Serbian architect Greta Ferušić—the only known person to have survived both Auschwitz and the Siege of Sarajevo—died in January this year in Sarajevo, Bosnia, at the age of 97. Though her work isn't widely known in the US, she was an architectural pioneer in Bosnia and the first woman to teach at the University of Sarajevo’s architecture school, where she eventually became dean.
Born Greta Weinfeld in the Yugoslavian city of Novi Sad in 1924, Ferušić was the only child of a prosperous Jewish businessman and his wife. In the 1997 documentary Greta, which chronicled her life story, she described her childhood as idyllic and carefree: “Every luxury was available to me,” she said, lovingly describing the “well-planned” home her family had built in 1935.
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