Efforts are underway in Wolfville, N.S. to honour a woman who put her life on the line to help Allied forces during the Second World War.
Mona Parsons was born in Middleton, N.S. in 1901 and grew up in Wolfville.
In her 20s, Parsons moved to New York, where she worked in theatre as a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl.
She later became a nurse and met a Dutch millionaire, whom she married and moved to Holland with.
On the couple’s second wedding anniversary, the Nazi's invaded Holland.
The pair helped hide allied airmen and was eventually caught.
Parsons' husband went into hiding, but Mona wouldn't go and ended up being arrested.
“This is a woman who never wore a uniform, never carried a gun, and was willing to put her life on the line and very nearly lost it for the things that she believed in like justice, like freedom,” says Andria Hill-Lehr, author of a biography on Parsons.
Her initial sentence was death by firing squad, but the judge – impressed by her composure – reduced it to a life of hard labour in a Nazi prison camp.
Parsons served for four years, and then escaped with a young Dutch woman during the Allied bombing in 1945.
“She decided to use her acting talents to pose as a women, a mentally challenged woman with a cleft pallet,” says Hill-Lehr.
The pair walked to the Dutch-German border, where Parsons met members of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders.
After her husband died, Parsons moved back to Nova Scotia and married Major General Harry Foster.
Parsons would eventually move back to Wolfville, where she died in 1976. Her headstone refers to her as the wife of Major General Harry Foster, but makes no mention of her incredible journey.
“We tried to name a park in town after her, we tried to name a street,” says Wendy Elliot, of the Women of Wolfville.
Those attempts failed, but there's a new effort led by the Women of Wolfville to have a statue erected in the town.
“Oh it's going to happen, it's just how soon it becomes a reality,” says Elliot.
The group has received approval from the town, as well as $8,000 from the provincial government.
They still need to raise about $15,000 to finish the project, but work is already underway by an artist who was born in Amsterdam nine months after the war.
“I experienced as a little baby some of that happiness that happened when Holland was liberated, and so I could feel that in Mona as well, and so that's why I gave her a very exuberant pose,” says artist Nistal Prem de Boer.
Prem de Boer hopes people will see that joy when they view the sculpture from a distance.
“When they come closer, maybe other thoughts come in because it was a very, very traumatic stressful period,” says Prem de Boer.
Elliot says she would like to see the work unveiled May 5, 2016, the anniversary of VE-Day and when Parsons was crossing the border into Holland again.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Jackie Foster
