Twenty years after her mother’s death, journalist Marisa Fox begins a deeply personal investigation that uncovers a hidden past more complex—and haunting—than she ever imagined. She knew her mother as Tamar, the fiery redheaded freedom fighter of British Mandate Palestine. But in truth, she was also Hela, a Polish-born survivor of a little-known Jewish women’s forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland.

Fox’s directorial debut unfolds like a detective story, weaving together riveting testimonies, archival discoveries, striking animation, and vérité filmmaking. At its center lies a secret journal written by teenage prisoners of the camp, revealing a harrowing and untold story of Nazi trafficking, sexual violence, and extraordinary resilience. As Fox tracks down surviving women across the globe, they break decades of silence, illuminating a hidden chapter of Holocaust history and the daring sisterhood that sustained them.

A moving work of remembrance and reckoning, My Underground Mother confronts the postwar silences and reinventions that shaped generations, while offering a profound meditation on memory, survival, and the complex inheritance between mothers and daughters.

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Sponsored by the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach