My Underground Mother is a powerful, first-person documentary feature film that chronicles filmmaker Marisa Fox's global quest to uncover the hidden past of her late mother, Tamar. Growing up in New York, Fox knew her mother as a fiery, irrepressible redhead who boasted of her time as a freedom fighter in the Israeli underground and claimed she was never a "Holocaust victim".

Twenty years after Tamar's death, a shocking family secret is revealed, prompting Fox to question everything she thought she knew. Her investigation, which unfolds like a detective story, leads her to a ghost factory at the site of Gabersdorf, a Nazi-run women's labor camp in the Czech Republic. There, the discovery of a collective diary penned by 60 teenage Jewish prisoners, including her mother (whose birth name was Hela), unlocks a buried chapter of women's Holocaust history largely omitted from official narratives.

The film gives voice to a "band of sisters" who forged a mighty resistance and risked their lives to document their experiences of trauma, survival, and agency. As Fox tracks down the remaining survivors worldwide, she not only unearths a story of Nazi trafficking and sexual violence but also embarks on an intergenerational journey of identity, reconciliation, and reckoning with the price of silence and shame. The documentary challenges Holocaust tropes and explores enduring questions about women's worth and the invisible scars of inherited trauma.

Marisa Fox

A veteran journalist and first-time filmmaker whose work spans print, broadcast, and digital platforms. She has produced award-winning stories and social impact campaigns for Hearst, Time Inc., and others, and written for outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Ms., The Forward, and Ha’aretz.