Freedom fighter, double agent, femme fatale — Tamar Fromer-Fox 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 her daughter on a global reckoning with the harsh truths she took to her grave.
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 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)
WHAT’s the PRICE of SILENCE?
That’s the driving question in My Underground Mother, a documentary about New York journalist Marisa Fox’s decade-long search for her late mother’s hidden past. Fox’s directorial debut unfolds like a detective story highlighting a secret journal from a Jewish women’s camp that reveals a shocking story of Nazi trafficking, sexual violence and empowering agency told by a band of sisters who became resistors when they were mere teenagers. Fox tracks down the camp’s remaining survivors all around the world who break their silence 80 years after WWII as she yearns to reconcile with a mother who claimed she wasn’t a "Holocaust victim."
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.
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.
DAUGHTER DETECTIVE
I juggle many roles on this scavenger hunt — daughter, detective, filmmaker, troublemaker, subject, narrator — appearing on-and-off screen, reaching thresholds I wasn’t meant to cross, yearning to connect with a mother who never let me in .When her name appears on the prisoner’s list of a camp I’ve never heard of, Gabersdorf, a women’s camp in Sudetenland, my search takes a startling turn.
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.
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.
In the camp, Jewish girls became sisters, resisters and saboteurs, forging a vital shield against Nazi brutality.
WHY NOW?
My Underground Mother is one of the only documentaries that addresses Holocaust sexual trauma and agency, and that gives women survivors the platform to tell their stories in their own voices.
The echoes of the past are loud, from the rise of hate and antisemitism, which surged 360% in the months following October 7th, to attacks on women’s rights and bodies, which are reminiscent of Nazis' targeting of Weimar-era reproductive and sexual freedom in Germany. Though Hamas’ mass rape on October 7th has been documented, it is being denied, just like sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women and girls was discounted after the Holocaust.
History has shown that widespread antisemitism, which thrives on scapegoating others, erodes democracy. Threats against Jews often lead to attacks against other groups, particularly women. Genocide scholars consider misogyny a dangerous and underestimated component of extremism today that results in a rollback of women’s rights and targeted sexual violence, a precursor to racial or ethnic conflict.
The film also explores a little-known, but vast network of forced labor camps, built by German industrialists to fuel the Wehrmacht. In the words of famed Australian survivor Kitia Altman: "What the Holocaust did is it ripped off the mask, opened up the Pandora’s box, and exposed what we can do to human beings when we will explore greed in them.” Concentration and forced labor camps were built by German industrialists through lucrative government contracts with the German military.
On the 80th anniversary of liberation, it’s time to listen to and learn from our subjects.
TEAM
MARISA FOX
Writer, Director, Producer
A veteran print, broadcast (WNET, VH1, Fx) and digital journalist, Marisa Fox has produced social impact campaigns for Hearst, earning American Society of Magazine Editors awards and nominations. She has written extensively on gender, genocide, sexual trauma and extremism (The Daily Beast, CNN, Ms.,The New York Times, Elle, Health, The Forward and Ha’aretz, where she was a U.S. correspondent) and is a “she source” for the Women’s Media Center, started by Gloria Steinem. My Underground Mother, Fox’s directorial debut, led her to curate and unveil Holocaust memorials in Poland and the Czech Republic, and a digital exhibit of women’s testimonies curated with USC’s Shoah Foundation.
DEBORAH SHAFFER
Producer
Guggenheim Fellow and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Deborah Shaffer directed the 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
Additional 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 for 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
2nd Director of Photography
Drop 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 Sabbath Queen, The Center, Spinoza, LaCerca 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.
ADVISORS
The film’s consultants 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 like Atina Grossmann, Natalia Aleksiun, Mehnaz Afridi and Björn Krondorfer.
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
It’s Time For A Holocaust #MeToo Reckoning
by Marisa Fox, Forward
https://forward.com/opinion/393518/its-time-for-a-holocaust-metoo-reckoning
DONATE
We knew from our history what it meant to be Jewish, but I didn’t know what it felt like on my body until Hitler rose to power ~Natalie Mehlman Scharf
OUR NEH GRANT WAS CUT
On April 2nd, President Trump cut all NEH grants approved under the Biden administration, which included our film. We need your help to complete post production and launch our festival tour, starting with our world premiere summer 2025. Because Trump also cut NEA grants, which fund nonprofit arts organizations from our fiscal sponsor, CID, to film festivals to libraries and museums that screen films with cultural, historical and humanitarian value, the documentary infrastructure has been severely eroded. We need your help to take our film on the road and support our community outreach, social impact and educational campaign to counter Holocaust denial, surging antisemitism and elevate women’s marginalized voices. At a time when the connection between antisemitism or racial hatred and wartime sexual violence has never been more apparent, the message of our film is sadly relevant.
FUNDING GOALS
Our production has received generous 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 Media, Music and Theatre, New York Foundation for the Arts, Remembrance and Future Foundation, Spungen Family Foundation, Karma Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and many private donors. Fox is a 2022 Jewish Film Institute resident, sponsored by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, won Pitch Royale at the Australian International Screen Forum, and was a finalist at Paley Doc Pitch.
©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2025