My Underground Mother — Claims Conference Film Grants

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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 yields startling, new information about Nazi-run women’s camps and the sexual trauma and agency its survivors experienced and hid from their own families.

Synopsis

“You think you know your mother until you don’t,” says filmmaker Marisa Fox. Tamar was a New York doctor’s wife who claimed she fled her native Poland on the cusp of World War II and was never a Holocaust “victim.” Twenty years after her death, Fox, a journalist and mother, learns Tamar had a secret identity and chases down leads that span the globe, uncovering a story of Nazi trafficking and a defiant band of sisters in a women’s forced labor camp. Dogged research, extraordinary archival imagery, and staggeringly candid interviews reveal a portrait of a woman who dared to be the hero of her own story, transforming herself from Nazi slave to freedom fighter, from refugee to spy and saboteur, ultimately reinventing herself as a matriarch in America. A real-life story of a daughter coming to terms with a woman who went to extraordinary lengths not to be defined by trauma.

About the Director

A veteran journalist, Marisa Fox has reported on 9/11 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, focusing on women, war, trauma, extremism and refugees for The Daily Beast, Elle, CNN, The New York Times, Health, Ms., Ha’aretz, where she was a U.S. correspondent, The Forward, and is a “she source” for Gloria Steinem’s Women’s Media Center. She was a producer at WNET, Vh1 and FX, and earned American Society of Magazine Editors awards and nominations, won pitch competitions, a humanitarian award for a women’s Holocaust monument she unveiled in Trutnov, Czech Republic, and curated a digital exhibit of women’s testimonies with USC’s Shoah Foundation. Fox holds an MS and BS from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, winning a National Journalism Society Award, and a Bachelor’s of Arts in French. She is a 2022 Jewish Film Institute fellow and received grants by the Claims Conference, National Endowment for the Humanities and others for her directorial debut.