FREEDOM FIGHTER, DOUBLE AGENT, FEMME FATALE:

My mother said she was all three. After her death, a secret diary from a Nazi women’s camp reveals a fourth identity, leading me on a global investigation to reckon 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 forced labor camps, through a daughter’s unraveling of her late mother’s hidden Holocaust past.

WHAT PRICE SILENCE?

Silence encourages the tormented, never the tormentor. ~Elie Weisel

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 YorkTimes, The Huffington Post, The Forward, The Daily Beast and CNN. Fox’s directorial debut unfolds like a detective story. Shot on location in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Israel, Canada and the United 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 NEH, Claims Conference, Jewish Story Partners, New York State Council on the Arts, NYC Women’s Fund for Music and Media, New York Foundation for the Arts, Remembrance and Future Foundation, Spungen Family Foundation and many private donors, and is being fiscally sponsored by the Center for Independent Documentary (CID).

MY STORY

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim. ~Nora Ephron

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?

©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2024