Thread by @kimwillsher1

RIP Greta Ferušić. Will never forget interviewing her in besieged Sarajevo in August 1993.
When she was freed from Auschwitz (she was prisoner A9232) she weighed just over 5 stone. Her parents and grandmother were murdered by the Nazis in the camp.
theguardian.com/world/2022/jan…

In 1993 she was trapped in the Bosnian capital, which was encircled and being bombed daily. Anyone who left their home was a target for snipers. I remember how strong and determined she was and the horror when she showed us the concentration camp tattoo on her arm.

Someone told us a Jewish woman who had survived Auschwitz was living in the city so we went looking for her. She lived less than a mile from the Bosnian Serb artillery positions attacking the city in a desolate apartment block. Shrapnel had ripped through the walls of the flat...

She said: "I never believed anything like this would happen to me again. I thought having lived through the Second World War and Auschwitz it was enough.
"I can't go out because I cannot bear to see the destruction of this beautiful city..

"... I don't want to leave. I have nowhere else to go and I have no strength to start again this time."

Before WW2 her family lived in Hungary near border of what was Yugoslavia. Afterwards she studied architecture at Belgrade University where she met husband Seid, a Bosnian Muslim from Sarajevo. Before the Yugoslav wars she was the Bosnian Environment minister for 4 years.