A woman who survived both the Auschwitz death camp and the Sarajevo siege in the 1990s has died, according to representatives of Bosnia’s Jewish community. Greta Ferušić Weinfeld died on Monday aged 97. Born in northern Serbia in 1924, Ferušić was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 along with several family members who were later murdered at the camp in Poland. She was the lone survivor from her family. After the end of the second world war, she returned to Serbia, studied architecture in Belgrade and later moved to the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. She worked as a professor at the University of Sarajevo’s architecture faculty, rising through the academic ranks to become the school’s dean. But amid the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Ferušić was again caught in the crossfire of war. During Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, Ferušić refused to be evacuated as Serb forces surrounded Sarajevo in what became a years-long siege where an estimated 11,000 people, including 1,600 children, were killed. “During the second world war, all of Europe was in trouble and suffering … (while during the Bosnian war) only 100 kilometres away as the crow flies people lived normal lives unaffected by the events and not noticing what was happening here,” she later said of the siege. “A magnificent person has left … she survived many good and horrible things,” said Haris Pašović, who directed a documentary on Ferušić, in a message posted on Facebook. The documentary – “Greta” – tells Ferušić’s dramatic life story and was later screened during several international film festivals following its release in 1997. In the film, Ferušić explained her decision to stay in Sarajevo amid the siege. “Already in my life I had been forced to leave my home. I will never leave my home willingly again,” she said. In 2004, Ferušić was awarded the Auschwitz Cross – a Polish decoration honouring survivors of Nazi concentration camps. The Holocaust saw the genocide of 6 million European Jews between 1939 and 1945 by the Nazis and their supporters.