Logline:

Freedom fighter, double agent, femme fatale --- Tamar said she was all three. Decades after her death, a page she wrote in a diary from a Nazi-run women’s camp reveals a hidden identity, leading her daughter on a global reckoning with the secrets she took to her grave.

Synopsis:

What’s the price of silence? That’s the driving question in My Underground Mother, a documentary that explores the daring sisterhood and hidden traumas of women during the Holocaust through a daughter’s unraveling of her late mother’s story. Tamar was a fiery redhead who lived on New York’s Upper West Side and boasted of her underground days fighting the British in mandatory Palestine. “I was a hero, never a victim” she said, claiming she fled her native Poland on the cusp of WWII and was “never in the Holocaust. ”Whenever Fox pressed her for details, she’d reply: “No more questions.” Tamar died young, a closed book. Twenty years after her death, Fox discovers Tamar had a hidden identity and launches a 10-year search for answers. The truth emerges through a secret journal from a Jewish women’s camp, revealing a shocking story of Nazi trafficking, sexual violence and agency told by her mother and a band of sisters, whom Fox locates around the world. They break their silence 80 years after liberation as she grapples with the shame her mother buried and frees herself from its shadow.

Director’s statement:

My mother’s fractured life story haunted me. Even as a girl, I found the dots in her life story didn’t connect. But the more questions I asked, the more she pushed me away. Her secrecy drove a wedge between us and led me to pursue journalism, a field predicated on questions and the type of factual answers she could never provide. In college at Northwestern, I wrote an editorial about a Holocaust denying professor, which elicited hate mail from David Duke. My mom’s response stunned me: “Change your name and transfer.” Twenty years after she died, I learned she had done just that. She changed her identity when she moved to the United States and concealed that she had been a Holocaust survivor. Why had she done that?That question fueled what would become a more than 10-year quest for answers. I learned my mother had been a prisoner of a Nazi-run Jewish women’s camp called Gabersdorf, and then I found a camp journal at Yas Vashemwhich contained a page she wrote as a teenager under a different name: “Behira,” which means clear or bright in Hebrew. Her prose shook me to my core. How little I knew her. Though I held her hand as she passed, I realized she died alone. This tragic reality compelled me to mine the depths of all she had tried to suppress. And that’s when I learned that my mother’s secret was far from unique.

When I began researching her past, camps like Gabersdorf were barely recognized by major institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and women’s narratives were mere footnotes in this history. But Gabersdorf, which finally made it into the 2nd volume of USHMM’s “Encyclopedia of Camps & Ghettos,” was part of a vast, underground network of 177 camps, where girls as young as 13 were exploited to fuel the Nazi war machinery. Tens of thousands of Jewish women survived in remote camps just like Gabersdorf, based in remote villages throughout the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany. They had been abducted from their ghettos, trafficked to remote areas as prisoners of factories, fed just enough to withstand grueling 12-hour shifts, beaten and tortured, forced to live in overcrowded barracks where lice and vermin were rampant, and though they somehow held on to life for more than four years, they slipped through history’s cracks. I’m often asked: Didn’t you see your mother’s tattoo? Well, no, I explain, only Auschwitz prisoners were inked. Perhaps that fact enabled my mother to pass, but it doesn’t explain why so many women became invisible survivors. As I read my mother’s journal page, I was struck by the line: “We are left to the whims of our ‘honorable leader’.” She seemed to be alluding to the sexual abuses more graphically documented on other pages by her fellow teenage inmates. When I first asked Gabersdorf survivors about their raw narratives, I was met with awkward pauses. It took a while to get them to trust me and open up. Even so, their accounts differed. What one woman viewed as sexually coercive, another viewed as agency. The truth was elusive, and for good reason. Rape is more than physical. It crushes the soul. It’s the ultimate form of powerlessness and a “shanda” or shame in the Jewish tradition. Why would anyone want to share such a degrading chapter with a husband or child? No wonder it’s taken 80 years to unpack the extent of sexual trauma women were subjected to during the Holocaust. Recently declassified files found at the United Nations War Crimes Commission Archives attest that rape, forced prostitution, sterilization, nudity and corporal shaming were so commonplace that prosecutors had enough evidence to charge perpetrators at postwar tribunals. But these cases were dropped at the Nuremberg Trials, and rape was never included as a war crime. Predators were exonerated and survivors, like my mom, silenced by a world that had a callous indifference for their suffering. Rape wasn’t recognized as a war crime until the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998, five years after my mother died.It has taken subsequent genocides, from Rwanda and Bosnia to contemporary conflicts like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ISIS' sex trafficking of Yazidi girls, as well as October 7th rape perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, for the world to see that “war and rape go hand in hand,” as Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz explained. Still, the world isn’t treating survivors of these crimes any better. Though Hamas livestreamed the atrocities they unleashed on girls and women in Israel, Oct. 7th rape denial is rampant, and Ukrainian survivors of Russian sexual torture are a long way from seeing justice. We must learn from my mother’s history, not only for today’s survivors, but for the sake of future generations.As a second-generation Holocaust survivor who never knew I was one, I think about how different my relationship with my mother might have been had the postwar world treated women survivors more humanely. I think about how vital it was for my mother to build her narrative as victimized, not a victim. “Being able to construct your story is a crucial part of treatment,” a therapist treating Nova survivors in Israel told me. “And being able to tell a story that describes the horrors of victimization but also celebrates your agency in overcoming it is a major step in the healing process. It means you control the trauma, it no longer controls you.”

My mother’s story was essential for her self-preservation, something I would never diminish. But being able to hold both truths – victim and hero – is the one that can free survivors from the shame that kept my mother a stranger from me. The story I want to tell joins both sides of her into a beautiful whole and takes that girl I never knew out of the shadows and into the light, where she belongs.

Director’s BIO:

MARISA FOX, Writer, Director, Producer

An award-winning journalist, Fox has covered major news stories from 9/11 (New York Magazine, New York Newsday) to the opioid crisis (The New York Times), from the 2017 Women’s March and rollback of women’s rights (Ms.), the Muslim ban (Haaretz) to the COVID pandemic, January 6th and the rise of white supremacy (The Daily Beast, CNN, the Forward). She was a U.S. correspondent for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, specializing in gender, genocide, sexual trauma and extremism, and is a “she source” for the Women’s Media Center, started by Gloria Steinem. Throughout her 30-plus year career, she served as a deputy magazine editor and has written cover stories and lead features for The Chicago Tribune, LA Times, InStyle, O, Elle, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter. She also was a television producer (FX, MTV, Vh1 and WNET) and a digital producer for Hearst, earning awards and nominations from the American Society of Magazine Editors. My Underground Mother, Fox’s directorial debut, led her to curate one of the only women’s Holocaust monuments at the site of the former Gabersdorf camp in Trutnov,Czech Republic, and a digital exhibit of women’s testimonies with USC’s Shoah Foundation. Marisa cut her teeth in investigative journalism as a college intern at the Better Government Association and covered foreign affairs as a college intern for the Jerusalem Post’s Washington, DC bureau. She holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s of Science in Journalism and a BA in French Language & Literature from Northwestern University, earning a National Magazine Award for her master’s thesis publication Arts Chicago.

Team Bios

DEBORAH SHAFFER, Producer

Guggenheim Fellow and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Deborah Shaffer directed The Wobblies, which was added to the National Film Registry in 2021. Shaffer has focused on human rights, from her Oscar-winning short Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements (1984) to the Academy Award-nominated short Asylum (2003) and Ladies First: The Women of Rwanda (Emmy, WNET, 2004). Her most recent film, Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack (2019), won the Audience Award and Best Documentary at the Hamptons Documentary Film Festival.

KELLY SHEEHAN, Producer

Kelly Sheehan has produced over 80 hours of nonfiction television and independent documentaries, including Four Seasons Lodge (2009) filmed in part by Albert Maysles, which premiered at New York’s IFC Center and was theatrically released by First Run Features; the Sundance Festival favorite Crossing Arizona (Sundance Channel, 2006); Follow My Voice with the Music of Hedwig (Sundance Channel, 2007), which premiered at Tribeca and presented by John Cameron Mitchell; the primetime special Mariachi High (PBS, 2012); and American River (WNET, 2021).

RACHEL REICHMAN, Editor

With a body of Emmy and Peabody Award-winning work, editor Rachel Reichman has focused on global women’s issues through films like Ladies First, about Rwandan women’s struggle to mobilize after genocide, and the PBS series Women, War and Peace. She also edited Martin Scorsese’s Letter to Elia and Hitchcock Truffaut; Peace Unveiled (PBS) and co-directed and edited Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack. She also has won a Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award and has worked for National Geographic, Discovery, Bravo, IFC, and The New York Times.

KEITH REAMER, Editor

Keith Reamer is an ACE editor who has cut over 60 features, documentaries and television shows. Many of his features have premiered at Sundance, Toronto, Berlin and Tribeca, such as Jed Rothstein and Alex Gibney’s The China Hustle, Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, and Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts, by Jeffrey Wolf.

HALIL EFRAT, EditorJerusalem-born, award-winning filmmaker and editor Halil Efrat was on the 2025 Oscar shortlist for the Alex Gibney produced documentary The Bibi Files. He is known or such films as Tantura, Foreign Land, Trophy, Aida’s Secrets, Album 61 and Souvenirs.

SLAWOMIR GRUNBERG, Director of Photography

Slawomir Grunberg is an award-winning producer, director who has shot over 50 documentaries, including School Prayer: A Community at War for PBS, which received an Emmy Award. His film, Karski and the Lords of Humanity won a 2016 Lavr Award. He has shot documentaries for HBO and PBS series Frontline, AIDS Quarterly, American Masters and NOVA.

DROR LEBENDIGER, Director of Photography

Dror Lebendiger is an award-winning cinematographer who has shot films for directors like David Attenborough, Emmy Award winning James Jacoby and Alex Weresow. His credits include Spinoza, LaSabbath Queen, The Center, Cerca and Holocaust themed Stalags and Who Will Remain.

WENDY BLACKSTONE, Composer

Award-winning composer Wendy Blackstone is known as the “score queen” for scoring over 140 TV shows and films, 10 of which have been nominated for Academy Awards. She is the first woman signed to CAA and one of the first women invited to the music branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Her most recent credits include: An American Bombing (2024), Cyndi Lauper: Let the Canary Sing (2023), Pelosi in the House (2022), 9 to 5: The Story of a Movement (2020), and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019).

MOLLY SCHWARTZ, Director of Animation

Molly Schwartz is an award winning artist and founder of animation and design studio Phlea TV, know for creating breathtaking 2- and 3-D visuals for such documentaries as Lady Bird Diaries, U.S. & the Holocaust, Worlds of Ursula K. Leguin, Watchers of the Sky and many others.

DEBORAH OPPENHEIMER, Executive Producer

Film and television producer Deborah Oppenheimer won an Academy Award for her documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, based on her mother’s wartime past. It was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2014. She also wrote and produced Foster, which received a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay in 2020. She was president of Mohawk Productions at Warner Bros, executive vice president of NBC Universal International TV Production, and executive VP of Carnival Films, where she conceived and led U.S. strategies for Downtown Abbey. She was appointed to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council by U.S. President Barack Obama.

NANCY SPIELBERG, Executive Producer

Nancy Spielberg has collaborated with director Roberta Grossman, on films like Who Will Write Our History, which had a global theatrical release through UNESCO on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and was shown at 300 venues around the world. Her titles include Vishniac, Closed Circuit, Aulcie, Above and Beyond, and A Letter to David, which premiered this year at the 75th Berlinale.

MICHAEL BERENBAUM, Executive Producer

A leading Holocaust scholar and author, Michael Berenbaum is a founding director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and an Academy Award, Emmy and Cable Ace Award-winning producer of several Holocaust films (One Survivor Remembers, Blessed is the Match, Defiance). He was also president/CEO of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and is Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute of Holocaust studies at American Jewish University.

MAIA HARRIS, Script Consultant

Harris is a two-time Emmy Award winner with 20 years experience writing and producing many PBS documentaries, namely GI Jews: Jewish Americans in World War II, about young European Jewish refugees who found redemption by returning to Europe to liberate it from the Nazis; Our Journey Through History, a 10-part series about a Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn; No Job for a Woman, about women reporters during WWII; and Banished, about racial cleansing in three American towns, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film’s NEH SCHOLAR ADVISORS include Holocaust post-trauma pioneer and clinical psychologist DR. EVA FOGELMAN writer and co-producer of award-winning PBS documentary Breaking the Silence; UNESCO chair and USC Shoah Foundation executive director emeritus STEPHEN SMITH and distinguished professors of history, Holocaust, genocide, gender and interfaith studies Dr.s ATINA GROSSMAN, NATALIA ALEKSIAN, MEHNAZ AFRIDI and BJORN KRONDORGER.

Story Elements & Main Characters

A Secret Unravels:

The mystery unfolds 20 years after Marisa’s mother’s death as she follows a trail of clues around the world to piece together the puzzle that was Tamar. Relatives caution her not to pry into family secrets. Undeterred, she grills a cousin in Israel who divulges her mom’s prewar name - Hela. Marisa travels to her Polish hometown in a once densely Jewish region by the German border. There she locates her birth record, revealing her Yiddish name, Alta Hendla (Hela in Polish) Hocherman.

Daughter/Detective:

Fox juggles many roles on this scavenger hunt — daughter, detective, filmmaker, troublemaker,subject, narrator — appearing on-and-off screen, reaching thresholds she wasn’t meant to cross, yearning to connect with a mother who never let me in. Fox investigates at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem where Hela’s name appears on a prisoners’ list of an obscure Jewish women’s camp called Gabersdorf in Sudetenland. It’s proof her mother was a Holocaust survivor, something she firmly denied.

A Hidden Diary:

The plot thickens when Marisa finds a page her mother wrote in a collective Gabersdorf journal recently donated to Yad Vashem by a survivor’s family in Australia, yet more evidence. The diary features 60 other names that form the basis of her search. Their writing offers an intimate window into the experiences of young women in Nazi-run forced labor camps. Her mother was only 15 years old when she wrote her entry and was the only one who signed her name in Hebrew, revealing yet another name Marisa never knew: Behira, which means bright and clear.

A Mighty Band of Sisters:

At Gabersdorf, inmates became lager schvesters, Yiddish for camp sisters, as well as resisters and saboteurs, forging a vital shield against Nazi brutality. The journal documents not only the daily abuses they withstood, but is itself a testament to writing as a form of resistance. Fox tracks down the authors from Manhattan to Melbourne, Australia to Malmö, Sweden, from Berlin to Los Angeles, Toronto to Tel Aviv. For the first time, Marisa introduces herself as Hela’s daughter, noting a shift in her own identity. Some women are guarded, others bracingly candid, and all shine a light on the shocking traumas her mom erased from her life story.

Some of Our Main Characters Include:

Sara Bialas

Berlin, Germany: A Yiddish singer, Sara was 13 years old when she was taken to the camp but has seared her memories into music. In a haunting scene, she sings a defiant Gabersdorf chant inside the rotting remains of the camp, which she refers to as a “pit of lunatics.” She points to her glass eye, the result of a beating, and shows her Jewish star pendant, engraved with her camp number. Sara wears her past like a badge, the opposite of Marisa’s mother, who buried it. Sata takes Marisa to the rotting factory floor where her mother worked, offering chilling on-location testimony.

Natalie Mehlman Scharf

Philadelphia: Natalie, or “Nacka M.” (pronounced Natchka) recognizes her page in the journal from Gabersdorf, which she refers to sarcastically as a “good camp.” She opens up about the high toll of survival there, which was anything but “good,” namely sexual barter with British POWs who offered starving prisoners food from their Red Cross parcels, SS visits that subjected them to forced nudity and more, andeventually liberation by Red Army troops who raped with abandon. “We knew what it meant to be a Jew,” she says, “but we didn’t feel it on our bodies until Hitler came.”

Fela Abelewicz

Rishon L’Zion, Israel: “Hela and I were inseparable,” says Fela, her camp sister. She was with Hela when the Gestapo hunted them down at gunpoint and abducted them from the ghetto of their hometown of Sosnowiec, Poland, through their 4+ years of incarceration at Gabersdorf and after, when Hela learned her mother had been killed in Auschwitz, as they crossed the Alps by foot into Italy to board a fleet of “illegal” ships into British mandate Palestine and even when she met her biological father.

Fryda Schweitzer

Melbourne, Australia: A school friend of Hela’s, Fryda recalls how they loved dancing the tango and foxtrot during their fleeting prewar youth, only to wake up to a nightmare. “Sosnowiec was taken on the very first day of the war because we were only 3km from the German border,” she says. She recalls receiving letters at the camp, until they all stopped. “We knew something must have happened, and that the people were no longer there,” she says. “Still I didn’t want to believe all the stories.” Marisa asks Fryda what she thought of her mother’s denial of her past. “I wasn’t very proud to hear this,”she replies, acknowledging that it took her a long time to finally open up about her past and start talking.

Lorka Gleitman

Malmö, Sweden: “We had a good life,” says Lorka, who lived in the same building as Hela and recalls her mother as a tall woman who had dark hair, dressed elegantly and resembled Marisa, who’s devouring learning about this grandmother she only knew as a face in a frame. When the war started and curfews were imposed, the two girls spent more time together. She shows photos of the two of them wearing gold stars, further proof Marisa’s mother was “in the Holocaust” contrary to what she claimed.

Bella Tovey

Silver Spring, MD: “We had some classes together,” says Bella, who recalled meeting redheaded Hela in 5th grade. On the cusp of 8th grade, the Nazis invaded and their school was closed. They would meet to share books like “The 40 Days of Musa Dagh” about the Armenian genocide. “Daddy, the Germans will do to us what the Turks did to the Armenians,” she recalled telling her father, who replied: “Bella, stop talking, the Turks were barbarians, the Germans are civilized people.” Though Bella reunited with Hela after she immigrated to the United States in 1955, Hela cut her off. She’s still hurt and wondering what she did wrong to alienate Hela when Marisa meets her. She explains her mother made her feel the same way. Together they learn to forgive themselves and help each other heal.

Tova Ajnreder

Yehud, Israel: Though now blind, Tova can see into her past clearly, from the near 400 Jewish teenage girls who were imprisoned at Gabersdorf, including her older sister Rusia who wrote in the diary, to the trysts that occurred in the bathroom, as inmates traded sexual favors with POWs for food. She recalls the SS forcing them to march one by one naked. “We had names for every aspect of our camp life,” she says. “We called this the spring parade.”

Lola Grunbaum-Israel

Haifa, Israel: Like many survivors of trauma, Lola harnessed her imagination to withstand the camp. “I’d look out the window and pretend the flowers outside were dancing in the wind just for me,” she says. But the memory of the SS nude inspections still haunts her. “They came to check out their ‘merchandise’, us,” she says, recalling that she was just 16 years old at the time, naked and alone in a room with two SS officers as they cackled and had her rotate around them. “Their laughter–and the fear!” She also revisits her former middle school in Sosnowiec, now a vacant lot overrun with weeds. “Your mother and her friends would walk home like this,” she says, locking arms with Marisa. “Can you picture it?”

Ida Richtman Steuer

Detroit, MI: “They selected which girls they wanted, like they sell slaves,” says Ida of how the various factory owners in Sudetenland lined them up and chose which ones they wanted for their camps. She remembers how their barracks were overrun with lice and bedbugs, that the SS played music and drank during nude inspections, which were a pretext to select sex slaves, and that pregnant prisoners were to be killed – along with their babies. “But your mother never told you about this?” she asks Marisa.

Lotta Wellner Grysman

Staten Island, New York: “I was 15 when I went away from my mother, but my brain didn’t grow because I didn’t go out, I didn’t play anymore,

I was just working,” says Lotta, of her three years at Gabersdorf. “When I came out of the concentration camp, I was the same age I went in. My life stopped.”

Yehuda Netzach

Hod Hasharon, Israel: Tamar’s cousin helps Marisa unravel her mother’s life story. He remembers how his father, Tamar’s maternal uncle Yaakov, returned from her funeral “furious,” because the rabbi’s eulogy didn’t reflect her “real history, nobodyknew.” Marisa presses him further until he reveals: “I heard the relatives calling her Hela. I understood that that was her name in Poland. All I knew was that she was older than she claimed and uh, that she was a love child.” After he divulges Hela’s last name, Hocherman, Marisa heads to Poland to find Hela’s birth record, which is the first bit of evidence she needs to investigate her past. Though Yehuda doesn’t think Tamar changed her identity to conceal being a love child, or a mamzer, a great source of shame in the Jewish religion, he tells Marisa to keep it a secret. She refuses to live a lie, which she believes will only perpetuate shame wrongly ascribed to women.

Ben Ferencz

Delray Beach, Fl: Disturbed by the many testimonies of sexual violence at Gabersdorf, Marisa interviews Ferencz, who was the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, about why rape was never included as a war crime at the historic postwar trial despite mounting evidence. “It was made very clear by the Russians that rape and victory go hand in hand, that we're not giving up our right to rape the women just because we happened to be at war,” he explains. “This was something which we didn't press hard because the Russians have opposed it. Absolutely.”

MEDIA

I’m One of the Filmmakers DOGE Targeted at the NEH. Here’s Why We’re in Trouble (Guest Column)

A documentarian describes what she and many of her peers have been going through as the Trump administration makes drastic cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

by Marisa Fox, Hollywood Reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/doge-neh-cuts-musk-donald-trump-1236211712/

Counting the Cost of Cuts to the Arts & Filmmaking Communities

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counting-the-cost-of-cuts-to-the/id1540439511?i=1000709423668

Will federal funding cuts spell the end for history documentaries?

The National Endowment for the Humanities is among the most reliable sources of funding for the genre. Terminated grants have filmmakers “living in a moment of crisis.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/05/20/neh-grants-canceled-history-documentaries/

Love Child, Holocaust Survivor, 'Freedom Fighter': The Secret Life Love Child, Holocaust Survivor, ‘Freedom Fighter’: The Secret Life My Mother Kept Underground

by Marisa Fox, Haaretz

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2015-04-21/ty-article/.premium/the-secret-life-my-mother-kept-underground/0000017f-e6de-da9b-a1ff-eeff66560000

It’s Time For A Holocaust #MeToo Reckoning

by Marisa Fox, Forward

https://forward.com/opinion/393518/its-time-for-a-holocaust-metoo-reckoning

END CREDITS

Director, Producer, Writer:

Marisa Fox

Producers:

Deborah Shaffer, Kelly Sheehan

Executive Producers:

Michael Berenbaum, Deborah Oppenheimer, Nancy Spielberg

Editors:

Rachel Reichman

Halil Efrat

Keith Reamer, A.C.E.

Directors of Photography:

Slawomir Grunberg

Dror Lebendiger

Andrew Abrahams

Animation &Graphic Design

Molly Schwartz & Lindsey Mayer-Beug

Music composed by

Wendy Blackstone

Featuring:

Fela Dancyger Abelewitz, Sonia Abiri, Rusia Ajnreder, Tova Ajnreder, Kitia Altman,

Hanna Armoni, Yael Ben-Dov, Ariana Bevilacqua, Leo Bevilacqua, Marcello Bevilacqua,

Michael Bevilacqua, Yael Ben-Dov, Sara Bialas, Sara Joelle-Clark, Michal Dror,

Benjamin Ferencz, Marisa Fox, Gerda Frieberg, Gina Fromer, Lorka Gleitman,

Lola Grunbaum-Israel, Wolf Gruner, Lotta Wellner Grysman, Helene Leperere,

Yehuda Netzah, Helga Blumenfeld Neuberg, Rina Offenbach, Barbara Rosenthal,

Natalie Scharf, Fryda Schweitzer, David Shomron, Stephen D. Smith,

Ida Richtman Steuer, Robert Tenenberg, Bella Tovey, Kala Zeltser.

Voice Actors:

Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jen Cohn, Danielle Apple, Daniella Rabbani

Voice Director:

Jen Cohn

Associate Producer:

Abigail Kollek

Additional Cinematography:

Alona Golberg, Paul Green, Magnus Rutberg, Chen Serfaty,

Nicolas Villegas, Rob VanAlkemade

Sound Recordists:

Wojtek Adamiak, Amir Boverman, Greg Plawski

Production Manager–Poland

Magdalena Nebelska

Animation Production

Kyle McCulloch, Mizuho Endo, Phlea TV

Cartography:

Sabine Lachmann

Graphic Design:

Peter Rosenbaum

Additional Editor:

Kayla Sklar

Assistant Editors:

Julie Tarrab Levy, Judd Blaise, Colin Fowler

Post-Production Supervisor:

Kirstine Barfod

Post-Production Picture Finishing Services

PostWorks New York

Colorists:

Jack Lewars, Tom Younghans

Conform Editor:

Ryan McMahon

Finishing Producer:

Patriciana Tenicela

Account Executive:

Pete Olshansky

Post Production Sound Finishing

PostWorks New York

Supervising Sound Editor & Re-Recording Mixer:

Christopher Koch, CAS

FX Editor:

Todd Yeager

Dialogue Editor:

Billy Gardner

Post Sound Producer:

Emily Gilmer

Chief Audio Engineer:

Phil Fuller

Director of Sound Finishing Services:

Jay Rubin

Additional Editing by The Edit Center

Director

Adam Bolt

Instructor

Stella Quinn, Daniel Bayer, Courtney Blackmer-Raynolds, Jordan Gosnell,

Archer Grano, Nancy Hoang, Corey Konjarevich, Kevin Miller, Kyu Nakama, Paulina Ortiz, Bianca Rico,

Joumana Rizk, Kenneth Robinson, Daniel Sgrizzi, Meredith Kaufman Younger, Jason Zucker

Translations:

Adam Chanes, Suzy De Lowe, Hannah Fischthal,

Ewa Kern-Jerydrowski, Cordelia Hahn, Jana Klein

Script Consultant:

Maia Harris

Story Consultants:

Roberta Grossman, Marcia Jarmel, Caroline Libresco

Scholar Advisors:

Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, Dr. Natalia Aleksiun, Dr. Michael Berenbaum,

Dr. Eva Fogelman, Dr. Atina Grossmann, Dr. Wolf Gruner,

Dr. Bjorn Krondorfer, Dr. Stephen D. Smith,

Dr. Elisa Von Joeden-Forgey

Archival Researchers

Sara-Joelle Clark, Jeff Cymbler, Stanley Diamond, Michal Dror,

Ita Gordon, Peter Lande, Rina Offenbach, Bonnie G. Rowan,

Frederic Richter, Sara Shor, Adam Szydlowski, Michael Tal

Photo & Documents Archives:

The Gabersdorf Diary, courtesy of

Fay Eichenbaum & Esther Gordon, Artifacts Collection,

Yad Vashem–The World Holocaust Remembrance Center

Abe Schanzer

Adele Winter

Anette Gajda

Ann Segan Rothstein

Arolsen Archives

Art Resource

Bintivey Ha'apala Information Center, Atlit Detention Camp

Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem

Chanita & Ishai Avraham

Craig Tovey

Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland, City Hall, Vital Records Office

Donald M. Ferencz

Esther Begam

Fay Eichenbaum

Fototeca Gilardi

G. Eric & Edith Matson Photo Collection

Ghetto Fighters’ House

Habricha Legacy Association

Helen Grysman

I.D.F. & Defense Establishment Archives

International Committee of the Red Cross Audiovisual Archives

Tim Nachum Gidal collection, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Jan Visek

Jeffrey Scharf

Helga Blumenfeld collection, Holocaust Museum LA

Lehi Archival Collection

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Marvin Rubner

Massuah, International Institute for Holocaust Studies, Tel Yitzhak

Matthew Frieberg

Melbourne Holocaust Museum

The National Archives & Records Administration (NARA)

National Digital Archives, Polish State Archives, Warsaw

Photographic Archives of the Municipality of Nonantola, Italy

Polish State Archives, Katowice

Polish State Archives, Warsaw

Ravensbrück Memorial Museum | Brandenburg Memorial Foundation

Ravensbruck/Brandenburg Memorials Foundations

Ronald Schweitzer & Family

State Archives of the Czech Republic – Trutnov

State Archives of the Czech Republic – Zamaersk

State Archive, Nuremberg, Germany

State Library of Australia, Victoria

U.S.C. Shoah Foundation

Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center,

Artifacts Archive, Photo Archives, Document Collection,

The Alina Dankowicz Family Collection,

Tzipora Abelewitz Family, Collection,

Moshal Repository

Yehuda & Riana Netzach

Shlomo & DaniNili Siegreich

Yeshiva University Archives

Zahava Siedner

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Photo Collection,

courtesy of Barbara Lipnicka Rosenthal, Lea Gleitman,

Chana Rosenbaum, William & Helen Luksenburg, Morris Rosen,

Benjamin & Hanka Schlesinger, Hadassa Cudzynowski Gerstner,

George Kadish/Zvi Kadushin,

Jacob Igra, Instytut Pamieci Nardowej,

Leopold Page Photographic Collection,

Charles Stein, Benjamin Meed, Martin Mansson, Lev Sviridov,

Benny Hershkowitz, Pauline M. Bower, Ehud Nahir,

Lillian Rajs Gewirtzman, Joseph Eaton, Dr. Alfred B. Sundquist,

Leah Lahav, Sam & Helen Bronner,

Moshe Berry, Anna Hassa Jarosky & Peter Hassa

Film & Newsreel Archives:

“Palestine Bombing,” British Pathé

“Projections of Jewish Life Before WWII,” courtesy of NARA, accessed at USHMM;

“The Fall of Poland,” courtesy of NARA, accessed at USHMM;

“Poland Invaded,” courtesy of NARA, accessed at USHMM;

“Jewish Ghettos of Dabrowa-Gornicza & Bedzin,” courtesy of NARA, accessed at USHMM;

“Spinning Flax,” British Pathé

“Fibre from Flax,” British Pathé

“British POWs,” British Pathé

“Female Survivors & Bergen-Belsen,” courtesy of NARA, accessed at USHMM;

“Women, Liberation & Europe Map,” courtesy of NARA, accessed at USHMM;

“Illegal Jewish Immigrant Ship,” British Pathée;

“Strife & Death in Palestine,” courtesy of NARA

“Martial Law Lifted in Palestine,” courtesy of NARs Licensing LLC;

“Terror Grips Palestine,” courtesy of NARA

“Palestine Crisis at Sea & Jerusalem,” courtesy of NARA;

“United Jewish Appeal Trip to Israel,” gift of Robert Wertheimer, accessed at USHMM;

“May 1945 Prague Uprising,” Periscope Film;

“Let My People Go,” Periscope Film;

“Creation of State of Israel,” Periscope Film;

“The Will to Live,” Periscope Film;

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC;

Digital Transfer of NARA footage by Colorlab Corporation

Original Music engineered & mixed:

Jack McLoughlin

Jack McLoughlin: guitars, bass, mandolin

Richard Martinez: piano, keyboards

Peter Maunu: additional guitars, violin

Judd Miller: winds

Steve Tavaligioni: winds

Wendy Blackstone: keyboards

“Lager Gabersdorf,” by Sara Bialas

“April Showers,” performed by the Eddie Elkins' Orchestra,

Polish Tango “Ty nie jeste winna,” performed by Artur Gold,

“El Maleh Rachamim,” performed by Cantor Azi Schwartz

“Lu Yehi,” performed by Chava Alberstein,

Consulting Producers:

David Tedeschi, Heidi Reinberg

Additional Consultants:

Alexis Alexanian, Kate Amend, Mirra Bank,

Nina Goldberg, Ellen Jacobson-Clarke,

Terry Lawler, Susan Margolin, Regina Weinreich

Fiscal Sponsor:

The Center for Independent Documentary

Additional sponsors:

Women Make Movies,

NYWIFT, Remember the Women

This film has been made possible in part by a major grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities

This film has been made with assistance from:

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims

Against Germany supported by the German

Federal Ministry of Finance

Jewish Story Partners

The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, presented by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts

The New York State Council on the Arts with the support ofthe Office of the Governor and the New

York State Legislature

Karma Foundation

The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture

The Jewish Film Institute

Special Thanks

Ivan Adamec, Mayor’s Office, Trutnov, CZ

Alfons Adam

Beit Yair Stern/ Lehi Museum

Dr. Sarah Brown & CHHange Center for Holocaust, Human Rights

& Genocide Education & The Center for WWII Studies, Brookdale Community College

Consul General of the Czech Republic, New York

Jakub Nowakowski, Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow

Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer

Konstanty Gebert

Gross-Rosen Museum

Gunter Fiedler, Trutnov Town Historian

Dr. Bella Gutterman

Dr. Anna Hajkova

Janine Holc

Jewish Genealogical Society-NY

JRI-Poland

Beth Kean, Holocaust Museum LA

Ann Kirschner

Tomas Kraus, Jewish Federation of the Czech Republic

Tomasz Kuncewicz, Auschwitz Jewish Center

Madene Shachar & Dr. Hanna Yablonka, Ghetto Fighters House, Israel

Publicity

Adam J. Segal

The 2050 Group

212-642-4317 (Office) • 202-422-4673 (Cell)

adam@the2050group.com • www.the2050group.com

https://myundergroundmother.com