Grunia Movschovitch Ferman (1916-2004) was a WWII resistance fighter, nurse, businesswoman, and Holocaust remembrance activist. Early life Grunia Movschovitch was born in Novogrudek in 1916. As a young woman, she took first aid courses and trained as a physical education teacher. As such she was pressed into service as a fitness trainer by the Russian army during its occupation of Western Poland (1939-41). She was forced to live in a ghetto, where, in 1941 she witnessed the execution of relatives and friends. After her brother was shot trying to escape and her father and another brother were sent to a concentration camp, she escaped. She briefly found shelter on a farm but had to leave as she posed a danger to the farm family. She found refuge in Naliboki Forest, in current-day Belarus, where she joined one of the organized camps of Jewish resistance fighters led by Tuvia Bielski. There she worked as a nurse and married Lewis Ferman, a fellow partisan who had lost his wife and daughter to the Nazis in the extermination of the ghetto of Lida. Lewis Ferman brought to the partisans his specialist knowledge as an electrician and was active in sabotaging the German supply lines as well as in rescuing people from the ghetto. Displaced after the war, the Fermans first went to Austria, then to Venice. In 1945, after surviving a bout of typhus, Grunia Ferman and her husband found shelter in a United Nations refugee camp in Rome where their daughter Leah was born in 1946. Life in Canada Following the war, the existing Jewish community in St. John's welcomed 26 Holocaust survivor families to Newfoundland, though various governments and administrations of the day rejected 12,000 individual applications from Jewish would-be refugees to Newfoundland and Labrador. In 1947, the Ferman family moved from Rome to St. John's, not having heard of the place before their departure. In St. John's, Lewis Ferman bought a truck, had "Lewis Ferman and Co." painted on the side, and worked as an itinerant merchant. In 1952, their son Alan was born, and the Fermans opened Lewis Ferman & Co. - "The Store for Style and Value" - on the northwest corner of Water Street and Adelaide Street in St. John's:The family's store on Water Street was both a place of business and a community meeting place. "They would come in to have a cup of coffee, or