Freedom fighter, double agent, femme fatale --- my mother said she was all three. Decades after her death, a page she wrote in a diary from a Nazi women’s camp reveals a fourth identity, leading me on a global reckoning with the harsh truths she took to her grave.

My Underground Mother is a personal documentary that explores the silenced sexual trauma and agency of survivors of Nazi-run Jewish women’s camps, through a daughter’s unraveling of her late mother’s hidden Holocaust past.

WHAT’s the PRICE of SILENCE?

That’s the driving question in MY UNDERGROUND MOTHER, a documentary about New York journalist Marisa Fox’s search for the secret past of her late mother, Tamar Fromer Fox, based on her articles for Ha’aretz, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Forward, and The Daily Beast. Fox’s directorial debut unfolds like a detective story. Shot on location in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Israel, Canada and theUnited States,

MY UNDERGROUND MOTHER is a gripping, first person narrative about a daughter hungering for reconciliation with a mother who claimed she wasn’t a Holocaust victim. The film has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Claims Conference, Jewish Story Partners, New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Women’s Fund for Music and Media, Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, Zygmund Rolat, Spungen Family Foundation and many private donors, and is being fiscally sponsored by the Center for Independent Documentary (CID).

MY STORY

Growing up in New York, I knew my mother as Tamar, an irrepressible redhead who spoke with a thick Polish accent, painted her lips in Revlon’s Fire & Ice and wove a dramatic tale of escaping Europe on the eve of World War II when she was a little girl. “I was never a Holocaust victim,”she’d say. “I was a freedom fighter.” As I got older, I realized her stories were as half-baked as the Sara Lee frozen pies she’d pass off as homemade. To my many queries, she'd reply: "No more questions." Then 20 years after she died, I learn a shocking family secret – my mother had a hidden identity. So here I am, a mother and a journalist. I built a career interviewing others, and the person I thought closest to me turns out to be a stranger. I don’t even know her name.

It hurt when she'd say: “You are not my daughter.”

Whose daughter am I?

A SECRET UNRAVELS

The mystery unfolds 20 years after my mother’s death as I follow a trail of clues around the world to piece together the puzzle that was Tamar. Relatives caution me not to pry into family secrets. Undeterred, I grill a cousin in Israel who divulges my mom’s prewar name - Hela. I travel to her Polish hometown where I locate her birth record, revealing her Yiddish name, Alta Hendla (Hela for short) Hocherman.

A HIDDEN DIARY 

The plot thickens when I find a page my mother wrote in a collective Gabersdorf diary, recently donated to Yad Vashem by a survivor’s family in Australia. The diary features 60 other names that form the basis of my search. Their writing offers unprecedented access to the experiences of young women in Nazi-run forced labor camps.©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2025

A MIGHTY BAND OF SISTERS

In the camp, Jewish girls became sister, resisters and saboteurs, forging a vital shield against Nazi brutality.

The film features interviews with dozens of survivors of women’s camps like Gabersdorf, where my mother was imprisoned, now living in Toronto to Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Australia to Malmö, Sweden. I introduce myself as Hela’s daughter, noting a shift in my own identity. Some women are guarded, others bracingly candid, and all shine a light on the shocking traumas my mom erased from her life story.

©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2025