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.