Greta Ferusic was 19 when she and her family were taken from their home in Novi Sad, in northern Serbia, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with thousands of other Serbian Jews. She was the only member of her family to survive the death camps. Nearly 50 years later, after a distinguished career as an architect and a professor, she refused to leave her home in Sarajevo when the siege of that city began.

“Once in my life, I had already been forced to leave my home,” she said in Greta, a 1997 documentary film about her life during two wars. “I will never again leave my home willingly.”

She died on Jan. 23 at her home in Sarajevo. She was 97. On Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, four days after her death, Bosnian National Television broadcast Greta in her honor.