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, Editor

Jerusalem-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.

DONATE

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