OUR SUBJECTS

THE LAST OF A GENERATION

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. Here are a few of our main subjects:

Lola Grunbaum Israel (Haifa, Israel) takes me to the site of the school she once attended with my mom in Poland. During the Nazi occupation, it became a ghetto sweatshop and eventually was the last place where Lola saw her mother and little sister before they were loaded onto cattle cars on the track behind their middle school.

Natalie Mehlman Scharf (Philadelphia) (Philadelphia) recalls the night the Gestapo stormed into her home looking for her sister, but she offered herself up instead. Her sister was later taken to Auschwitz and killed. “Was I better off that I went to Gabersdorf, a ‘good camp’?” she asks. “Did the others know what was really going on?”

Sara Bialas Tenenberg (Berlin), a Yiddish singer with a glass eye and a Jewish star pendant engraved with her prisoner number, takes me to the Czech town where Gabersdorf was based. We sneak past the barbwire into a ghost factory. She chants, “Our camp is a lunatic asylum,” recalling how she lost her eyeball in a vicious beating.

Ida Richtman Steuer (Detroit) speaks plainly about the sexual trauma she endured at the hands of German guards, SS officers and even their Russian liberators. She says her camp sisters helped her survive the war and its aftermath, as they restarted their lives on new shores, war orphans who became the family they lost.

Bella Jakubowitz Tovey (Washington, D.C.) recalls her friend Hela’s visit in 1956 when she arrived in the U.S. to attend college after 10 years in Israel. “She was in bad shape,” she says. “She stayed with me for a few weeks. We vowed to stay in touch, then she cut me out.” Bella still blames herself for my mom’s hurtful distance, just as I had. Can we learn to forgive ourselves and reconcile with a woman who paid a high price for denying her past?

©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2023