SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9
ObituariesBY EMILY LANGER“If there is such a thing as
karma or fate,” Greta Weinfeld
Ferusic once told an interviewer,
“then I’m angry with mine.”
Ms. Ferusic, who died Jan. 23 at
97, was believed to be the only
person to have survived
Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp
in occupied Poland where her
family was murdered with nearly
1 million other Jews during the
Holocaust, and the nearly four-
year siege of Sarajevo during the
Balkan wars a half-century later.
“Why,” she asked, “should it be I
who [must] live through these
things twice over?”
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 Sara-
jevo, 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 de-
clared, and once was enough.
Greta Weinfeld was born on
June 26, 1924, in Novi Sad, the
capital of what is now the autono-
mous 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 re-
member 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. Ger-
many 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 syna-
gogue. They were eventually load-
ed onto cattle cars, at which
point, she said in the documen-
tary 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 “non-
chalant gesture” of a Nazi officer.
“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 re-
turned 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.”
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 passinggrade, she had won the confi-
dence to move forward in life.
In 1948, she married a fellow
student, a Bosnian Muslim
named Seid Ferusic. They settled
in Sarajevo, where Ms. Ferusicbecame a professor and later
dean of the architecture faculty at
the city’s university. She also
worked in Paris and traveled ex-
tensively throughout Europe and
beyond, living the cosmopolitanexistence that long distinguished
the multiethnic city of Sarajevo.
Ms. Ferusic once told the Los
Angeles Times that she had
thought she would have a “beau-
tiful end” to her life, with a secure
pension, a comfortable home and
a summer home by the seaside.
But another war intervened.
She was 67 when the siege of
Sarajevo began in April 1992, one
of the darkest episodes in the
wars that raged across the Bal-
kans as Yugoslavia disintegrated
amid ethic 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 leav-
ing 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 will-
ingly.”
Nothing, she said, could com-
pare to the suffering she experi-
enced at Auschwitz. But in some
ways, she observed, the siege of
Sarajevo was more difficult to
endure than World War II. Dur-
ing World War II, she said, every-
one knew that one day liberation
would come. The blockade of
Sarajevo, however, seemed un-
ending.
Deepening her despair, she
said, was the apparent indiffer-ence of much of the Western
world and the fact that the forces
brutalizing Sarajevo were not for-
eign invaders, but rather fellow
citizens of what had been Yugo-
slavia, 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 Sun-
day quoted her as saying in 1993.
“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 Barce-
lona and Dubrovnik, Croatia; two
grandsons; and two great-grand-
sons.
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 Saraje-
vo. 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 docu-
mentary, “this was Sarajevo defy-
ing the barbarism that was trying
to destroy it.”
GRETA WEINFELD FERUSIC, 97
Liberated from Auschwitz, she survived the siege of Sarajevo 50 years later
FAMILY PHOTO
Greta Weinfeld Ferusic, seen in an undated photo, was a professor
of architecture and the subject of a 1997 documentary film.BY HARRISON SMITHBetty Davis, a free-spirited,
genre-busting funk singer who
influenced generations of artists
with her libidinous stage pres-
ence, bluesy melodies and bold,
uninhibited lyrics about sex, love
and desire, died Feb. 9 in Home-
stead, Pa. She was 77.
Her death was announced in a
statement shared by her record
label, Light in the Attic, which did
not cite a cause.
With her silver go-go boots,
towering Afro and uninhibited
vocals, Ms. Davis was one of the
most formidable performers of
the mid-1970s, strutting across
the stage in lingerie or shiny,
futuristic outfits. She considered
herself “more of a projector” than
a singer, and yowled, screamed,
cackled and cooed depending on
the song, developing a raw and
blistering brand of funk that
drew on rock and soul, and that
influenced artists from Prince to
Janet Jackson.
“She seemed sure, free, bold
and unafraid at a time when
women and Black people were
supposed to feel afraid or limit-
ed,” singer Macy Gray told The
Washington Post in 2018. “And
then Betty Davis comes along and
rose above that on her own. She
presented herself as someone
who wasn’t captive by all that. She
seemed to fly and skip right over
that and do her thing the way she
wanted to do.”
Long before sexually explicit
lyrics became commonplace, Ms.
Davis recorded songs that were
brazenly carnal, filled with lust
and sly wit. “You said I loved you
every way but your way,” she sang
in the title track of her 1975 album
“Nasty Gal,” “and my way was too
dirty for you.” Her song “He Was a
Big Freak” was more direct, open-
ing with the line, “I used to beat
him with a turquoise chain.”
“I wrote about love, really, and
all the levels of love,” Ms. Davis
said in a 2018 interview with the
New York Times. Naturally, she
added, sexuality was one of her
chief subjects: “When I was writ-
ing about it, nobody was writing
about it. But now everybody’s
writing about it. It’s like a cliche.”
Ms. Davis also wrote songs
about racial discrimination, mu-
sic history and the sheer exhaus-
tion of being alive in the 1970s.
(“The blues are taking over, and
they’re running my soul.”) But her
erotic lyrics infuriated religious
groups as well as the NAACP,
which boycotted Black radio sta-
tions that played her music, say-
ing she was a bad role model for
African Americans. After releas-
ing three critically acclaimed al-
bums in the span of a few years,
she retreated from the music in-
dustry in the late 1970s, fading
from public view.
By then, she had helped alter
the trajectory of jazz through her
relationship with trumpeter
Miles Davis, whose name she kept
long after their brief marriage
ended in divorce. Ms. Davis intro-
duced him to rock artists Jimi
Hendrix and Sly Stone, helping to
pave the way for electric albums
such as “Bitches Brew” (1970), a
landmark in the burgeoning
genre of jazz fusion. (As she told
it, Miles had planned to title the
album “Witches Brew” before she
suggested an edgier name.)
Ms. Davis later reached new
listeners through hip-hop, as Ice
Cube, Method Man, Talib Kweli
and Ludacris rapped over songs
such as “Shoo-B-Doop and Cop
Him” and “If I’m in Luck I Might
Get Picked Up.” After Light in the
Attic Records reissued her al-
bums in the 2000s, she was in-
creasingly cited by musicians
who celebrated the fiery inde-
pendence of an artist who wrote,
arranged and produced her own
records.
“I love Betty Davis. She’s free,
and she’s one of the godmothers
of redefining how Black women
in music can be viewed,” Janelle
Monáe told Complex magazine in- Looking back at Ms. Davis’s
legacy that same year in a conver-
sation with the singer-songwriter
Joi, Erykah Badu concluded, “We
just grains of sand in her Betty-
ness.”
Betty Mabry was born in Dur-
ham, N.C., on July 26, 1944, and
grew up in rural North Carolina
and in Homestead, j ust outside
Pittsburgh. Her father worked at
a steel mill, and her mother and
grandmother encouraged herlove of music, especially the
blues.
By age 12, she was writing
songs of her own, including a
number titled “I’m Going to Bake
That Cake of Love.” She later paid
homage to the blues artists who
shaped her childhood in “They
Say I’m Different,” name-check-ing artists including Elmore
James, John Lee Hooker, Robert
Johnson and Jimmy Reed.
After graduating from high
school, Ms. Davis moved to New
York, where she studied at the
Fashion Institute of Technology
and worked as a model. She ap-
peared in magazines such as
Glamour and Seventeen — a rari-
ty for a Black woman at the time
— and also made connections in
the music industry, meeting art-
ists at a club called the Cellar.
She released her first commer-
cial single, “Get Ready for Betty,”
in 1964 but found far greater
success as a songwriter when the
Chambers Brothers recorded her
song “Uptown” three years later.
Around that same time, she met
Miles Davis; as she told it, she was
at one of his Village Gate per-
formances when the trumpeter
spotted her and dispatched his
bodyguard to invite her over for a
drink.
Ms. Davis and Miles married in
1968 — he was 42, she was 24 —
and divorced after what she de-
scribed as a tumultuous and
sometimes violent year. He sus-
pected her of having an affair
with Hendrix, which she denied.
“I learned a lot musically,” she
told The Post in 2018, looking
back on their marriage. “I always
said to Miles, ‘I should have been
born your daughter.’ Because our
relationship was very enlighten-
ing as far as my music was con-
cerned.” Davis, who had her face
photographed for the cover of his
album “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” in-
troduced her to classical music
and encouraged her to sing, pro-
ducing recording sessions that
were ultimately released in 2016.
Ms. Davis’s early studio work
attracted the interest of Greg Err-
ico, the drummer for Sly and the
Family Stone. He produced and
drummed on her self-titled 1973
debut, which included songs such
as “Game Is My Middle Name,”
while Ms. Davis took over the
production of her follow-up,
“They Say I’m Different” (1974).
In addition to Errico, her rec-ords featured leading musicians
including bassist Larry Graham,
the Pointer Sisters and members
of the Tower of Power. But by all
accounts, it was Ms. Davis who
conceived and orchestrated the
ensemble’s overall sound.
“Betty would get the ideas for
the music, and she would put it on
tape. She’d be humming on the
cassette, and we’d learn all the
parts,” backing guitarist Fred
Mills told the Times. “She had it
in her head all the time. And she
would always be, like, ‘You got to
get rough!’ Lord have mercy, she
was killing me.”
Ms. Davis earned some of the
best reviews of her career with
“Nasty Gal,” which she recorded
after signing a major contract
with Island Records. But the al-
bum’s sales were disappointing,
and the label decided to shelve
her follow-up. No one else came
calling, she said.
After her father died in 1980,
she spent a year in Japan, meet-
ing silent monks at Mount Fuji
and experiencing a kind of spirit-
ual awakening, according to the
2017 documentary “Betty: They
Say I’m Different.” She returned
the United States and, she said, “I
just got very quiet.” By 2018, she
was living in Homestead at an
apartment for senior women run
by Catholic Charities.
She leaves no immediate survi-
vors, according to her friend Dan-
ielle Maggio, a singer, ethnomusi-
cologist and associate producer of
“Betty.”
In 2019, Ms. Davis wrote and
produced her first song in 40
years, “A Little Bit Hot Tonight,”
with Maggio singing lead. By then
she had ruled out a return to the
stage, saying she treasured her
anonymity and didn’t want to
alter the image that fans had in
their minds.
“I like that nobody knows who
I am when they see me. I like to
live quietly,” she told The Post.
“But it would be nice to be re-
membered that at one time, she
made good music and she made
people smile.”BETTY DAVIS, 77
Free-spirited funk singer and songwriter had her heyday in the 1970s
FIN COSTELLO/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
Betty Davis, a singer/songwriter and former wife of jazz musician
Miles Davis, poses for a photograph in 1976. She released three
critically acclaimed albums in the span of a few years but retreated
from the music industry in the late 1970s.Obituaries of residents from the
District, Maryland and Northern
Virginia.
Rhoda Stevens,
Wolf Trap volunteer
Rhoda Stevens, 91, a volunteer
for 30 years at the Wolf Trap
National Park for the Performing
Arts, died Dec. 6 at her home in
Vienna, Va. The cause was a
stroke, said a son, Curtis Stevens.
Mrs. Stevens was born Rhoda
Pickwick in Lisbon, N.H., and had
lived in the Washington area for
47 years. She was a swimming
instructor.Mario Casarella,
Catholic University teacher
Mario Casarella, 88, a teacher
in the department of mechanical
engineering at Catholic Univer-
sity from 1965 to 1999, died Dec.
22 at a hospital in Silver Spring,
Md. The cause was cardiac arrest,
pneumonia and renal failure,
said a son, Peter Casarella.Dr. Casarella, a resident of
Laurel, Md., was born in Meri-
den, Conn. He came to live in the
Washington area in the late
1950s, working for IBM in
Bethesda, Md. While serving on
the Catholic University faculty, he
also worked as a civilian engineer
for the Navy at the David Taylor
Model Basin at Carderock, Md.Stephanie O’Konek,
real estate sales agent
Stephanie O’Konek, 69, a realestate sales agent with Pardoe
Realty of Georgetown and later
with the Washington office of
Sotheby’s, died Dec. 24 at a
hospital in Rockville, Md. The
cause was complications from
covid-19, said a friend, Joan
Cromwell.
Ms. O’Konek, a resident of
Gaithersburg, Md., was a native
Washingtonian. She began her
real estate career in the 1970s
and remained in the business
until shortly before her death.OF NOTESamo Lesjak,
Army chief warrant officer
Samo Lesjak, 87, a retired
Army chief warrant officer who
lived in the Washington area
since 1990, died Oct. 9 in home
hospice care in Springfield, Va.
The cause was congestive heart
failure and terminal bile duct
cancer, said his daughter Patricia
Lesjak Davis.
A native of Ljubljana, Yugosla-
via, what is now Slovenia, Mr.
Lesjak fled communist rule inEastern Europe in 1951 and
joined the U.S. Army while living
in Italy. In his 16-year active
military career, his assignments
included time with the 82nd Air-
borne Division, the 101st Air-
borne Division and two tours of
duty in the Vietnam War. For
about 10 years until the late
1990s, he taught college-level
business and Serbo-Croat lan-
guage courses to U.S. service
members.
— From staff reports