Ms. Ferusic, a retired professor of architecture who rose to the top of her field in the former Yugoslavia, was the subject of a 1997 documentary film, “Greta,” by the Bosnian director Haris Pasovic. Her son, Edgar Ferusic, confirmed her death in an email but did not cite a cause. Ms. Ferusic died at her home in Sarajevo, he said, the city she had refused to abandon even amid unremitting shelling and sniper fire; she had been forced to leave her home once before, she declared, and once was enough.
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Greta Weinfeld was born on June 26, 1924, in Novi Sad, the capital of what is now the autonomous province of Vojvodina in northern Serbia. An only child, she enjoyed what she described as a “carefree” youth in the relative luxury afforded by her father’s success as a businessman. Years later, when that carefree life had been lost, she would lovingly remember the fruit trees her family cultivated in their orchard.
Vojvodina, which belonged to Yugoslavia at the time of Ms. Ferusic’s birth, was controlled by Hungary, one of the Axis powers, for much of World War II. Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, and the next month, Ms. Ferusic recounted, all the Jews still remaining in Novi Sad were gathered at the local synagogue. They were eventually loaded onto cattle cars, at which point, she said in the documentary film, “we knew our fate was sealed.”
After a journey that lasted four days, they reached Auschwitz. Women were separated from men. Children and the elderly were sent in one direction and the more able-bodied in another by what she described as the “nonchalant gesture” of a Nazi officer.
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“Later we learned that those on the left had gone straight to their deaths,” she said. “We who went to the right had not gone to life, but to postponed death.”
Ms. Ferusic was 19 when she entered Auschwitz and 20 when she was liberated by the Soviet army on Jan. 27, 1945, the only member of her family still alive. She weighed 70 pounds. She returned to Novi Sad and, after a period of convalescence, set out to build a new life for herself.
“My reasoning,” she said in the film, was “that it was better to think about the future, and what could be done with it, than to mourn for what had been and for what was lost. I was young, and it was logical that my eyes turned to the future and not to the past.”
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She enrolled at the University of Belgrade to study architecture but found that her memory had been profoundly damaged by her wartime trauma. She recalled as a “turning point” the moment when she passed a mathematics exam that many other students failed. Along with the passing grade, she had won the confidence to move forward in life.
In 1948, she married a fellow student, a Bosnian Muslim named Seid Ferusic. They settled in Sarajevo, where Ms. Ferusic became a professor and later dean of the architecture faculty at the city’s university. She also worked in Paris and traveled extensively throughout Europe and beyond, living the cosmopolitan existence that long distinguished the multiethnic city of Sarajevo.
Ms. Ferusic once told the Los Angeles Times that she had thought she would have a “beautiful end” to her life, with a secure pension, a comfortable home and a summer home by the seaside. But another war intervened.
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She was 67 when the siege of Sarajevo began in April 1992, one of the darkest episodes in the wars that raged across the Balkans as Yugoslavia disintegrated amid ethnic and religious rivalries. For 1,425 days — the longest siege in modern warfare — Serbian nationalist forces blockaded the city. Residents were often without food, water, gas and electricity. More than 10,000 Sarajevans would die by the time the siege ended in February 1996.
At one point, an unexploded shell landed in Ms. Ferusic’s home. Food was so scarce, she said, that she began “to look as I had looked in the death camp.” But never did she consider leaving Sarajevo.
“Firstly, I belong to this city,” she said in the documentary. “Let what happens to other people also happen to me. Secondly, once in my life I had already been forced to leave my home. I will never leave my home again willingly.”
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Nothing, she said, could compare to the suffering she experienced at Auschwitz. But in some ways, she observed, the siege of Sarajevo was more difficult to endure than World War II. During World War II, she said, everyone knew that one day liberation would come. The blockade of Sarajevo, however, seemed unending.
Deepening her despair, she said, was the apparent indifference of much of the Western world and the fact that the forces brutalizing Sarajevo were not foreign invaders, but rather fellow citizens of what had been Yugoslavia, her neighbors and former students.
“When I was in Auschwitz I was optimistic I would survive. When I left, I was just happy to be alive,” the London Mail on Sunday quoted her as saying in 1993.
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“But this war is different. I am older now, too old to be too optimistic. If I survive, I survive, if not, I don’t. I have no future. I am old.
“I never believed anything like this would happen to me again. I thought having lived through the Second World War and Auschwitz … was enough.”
The Dayton peace accords, reached near Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, helped bring an end to the Balkan war, although another conflict would erupt in the region later that decade in Kosovo.
Ms. Ferusic’s husband died in 2007 after nearly six decades of marriage. Survivors include their son, also an architect, of Barcelona and Dubrovnik, Croatia; two grandsons; and two great-grandsons.
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Although her life, bookended by wars, might have seemed to leave little reason for hope, Ms. Ferusic took heart in the daily acts of courage she saw in Sarajevo. She spoke admiringly of the actors, musicians, artists and teachers who nurtured the city’s cultural life during the siege, and of the many people who risked their safety to partake of it amid shelling.
“For me,” she said in the documentary, “this was Sarajevo defying the barbarism that was trying to destroy it.”
