When journalist Marisa Fox was a young girl, her mother would regale her with stories of her own youth, all of which roiled with drama and consequence. When she was a 13-year-old girl living in Poland in the late 1930s, on the brink of the Nazi occupation, her mother told her she was pulled away from her mother and put on a boat to Palestine where she spent the rest of the second world war. As a teenager in that country, she said she became part of a radical Jewish underground group for whom she acted as a spy and a saboteur, smuggling bombs and guns which they used against the British army who ran the country at the time and who they very much wanted to force out. “I was a hero,” her mother would often boast, “never a victim.”
Stories like those both dazzled and horrified the young Fox, but by the time she was nine she began to realize that certain parts of the tale didn’t add up. “I would say to her: ‘Wait a minute, if you were born in 1935 and [the second world war] started in 1939, you would have been four, not 13,’” Fox said. “Whenever I would say that, she would say: ‘No more questions.’”
Fox never got any clearer answers from her mother before she died of colon cancer in 1993. A college student at the time, Fox not only felt loss but also bafflement. It wasn’t until 2010 that she received her first glimpse of the truth. She was having tea with an elderly great-aunt who, by then, was suffering from dementia, a condition which, Fox believes, made her inadvertently blurt out: “Your mother had a hidden identity,” after which she darkly added: “You’re not going to be happy with what you find.”
That titbit fired a mission in Fox to finally uncover the true story of her mother, a tale that turned out to be even more dramatic, troubling and sad than the one she had always been fed. That’s the story that’s finally being told in a revelatory new documentary directed and written by Fox, titled My Underground Mother. Through relentless sleuthing over a 15-year period during which she tracked down sources from around the world, Fox discovered that her mother had lied to her, as well as to her father, her siblings and everyone else in her adult life about key information including her true age, her real name, as well as the fact that she had actually lived in Poland for the entire duration of the war.
Talking to Fox in her New York apartment as she traces her mother’s complex story has an eerie resonance since they share a number of physical features. “We even wear our hair the same way,” she said.
That’s the reason, she now believes, her mother was so shaken when Fox entered adolescence. “When she saw my body changing, and she saw the male gaze coming into view, she became protective in a way that went beyond the normal pale of Jewish mothers,” Fox said. “She was always nervously trying to tell me to cover up. And I didn’t understand it. Her relationship with me began to change and harden.”
Fox believes her mother was triggered by her budding womanhood due to the specific circumstances of the secret part of her history. When the Nazis began their reign of terror in Poland, her mother was actually about 14 and living in a small town near the German border. Her birth mother wound up being sent to Auschwitz while she, and hundreds of the other teenage girls in the area, were taken to a forced labor camp named Gabersdorf. There, they were imprisoned and made to work back-breaking shifts to provide free labor and assets that the Nazis used to help finance the war. The first-hand testimonies Fox offers in the film couldn’t be more moving, drawn from scores of women who had been at Gabersdorf who she tracked down in countries from Sweden and Australia to the US and Israel. The way she accomplished that forms the movie’s main plot, creating an edge-of-your-seat experience for the viewer. The scores of women Fox found, 18 of whom made the film’s final cut, were by then in their 80s and 90s. Since filming began, all but three of those women have died. “Whenever I would hear about somebody relevant to the story, I would hop on a plane to speak to them,” Fox said. “There was no time to waste.”
Tracking them down was one thing, but getting them to speak about their most traumatic experiences became a psychological challenge. “I had to earn their trust,” the director said. “A lot of them asked: ‘Do you love your mother?’ because they wanted to make sure I wasn’t out to tell some salacious story. Then, there was a tension between their loyalty to my mother and however much they felt she had abandoned them by lying about her past. They didn’t understand how she could do like that. These women had been everything to each other and, after the war, my mother cut them off.”
In the end, the women’s role as witnesses to history, as well as their earlier connection to Fox’s mother, won them over. “They were curious to find out what the hell happened to their friend and why she did what she did,” the director said.
The stories the women told Fox about Gabersdorf paint a picture of a harrowing place that grew exponentially worse as the war slogged on. In a coup, Fox not only had the women’s riveting testimony but also a journal they created at the time, to which 60 of the girls contributed. Lines written by Fox’s mother in the journal when she was a teen are among the most eloquent, imagining a defiant future beyond the camp, a sign of her deep survival instincts. “My mother was a badass, even at a young age,” Fox said.
Crushing and depressing as their workload and their isolation was, Fox found some fascinating nuances in the lives of certain girls through their relationships with some British PoWs who were later brought to the camp. While the Jewish girls were barely sustained, the PoWs were allowed to receive Red Cross packages, including food and chocolate which they used to entice the girls into sex. With striking honesty, the journal reveals the flings that went on between the PoWs and some of the girls. “The Diary of Anne Frank this wasn’t,” Fox quips in the film.
Tellingly, the women who speak on that subject only talk about relations experienced by other girls, never themselves. “These girls were so young, so they had no sexual experience before this,” Fox said. “Their life was completely uprooted, and they were utterly dehumanized right when they were beginning to feel those raging hormones. When all of a sudden, a guy wants you, in that context it becomes exciting. Of course, sexual bartering is a war crime and perhaps some of the girls reported their agreement to the sex just to prove they had agency, but there could also be love and lust. Several of the women later married those PoWs.”
Two years into their imprisonment, however, the sexual aspect of life in the camp took a far darker turn. In 1943, when the killing apparatus of the Nazis went into overdrive, SS men and women took over the camp. They instituted practices like nude inspections in which the guards would select certain women to be trafficked as sex slaves for Nazi soldiers on the eastern front. “Those women who were taken from the camp were never heard from again,” Fox says.
Other girls at the camp were raped right there, turning the place into a kind of corollary to the “Joy Division” brothels at places like Auschwitz, a grotesque practice later alluded to the 1953 novella House of Dolls by the novelist and camp survivor credited as Ka-Tzetnik 135633, as well as in the name for the dark, post-punk band led by Ian Curtis in the late 1970s. In the film, Fox reveals the horrors certain girls experienced at Gabersdorf, including one who was murdered for becoming pregnant from a rape.
No record of sexual crimes by the Nazis was kept, a striking feature given the fact that the Germans left incredibly detailed documentation of their other crimes, a key reason we know so much about them. One reason the Nazis omitted sex crimes, Fox believes, was because it was illegal there for non-Jews to have sexual relations with Jews. “It was considered ‘racial defilement’,” she said.
In 1945, when the war finally ended, the incidents of rape didn’t cease. The Russian liberators at Gabersdorf violated the girls as well. Even after Fox’s mother made it to Italy on her way to Palestine, one man tried to use sexual coercion as payment for his aid.
Given her mother’s treatment in Poland, when she finally got to Palestine, she wanted to remake herself and she joined an insurrectionist movement that, eventually, had a hand in the creation of the state of Israel. Though her mother always saw herself as a freedom fighter, Fox says it wouldn’t be unfair to consider her a terrorist. “These people were taking the law into their own hands,” she said.
After Israel was established, survivors of the Holocaust were often looked upon in the country with suspicion and condescension or seen as damaged goods. For that reason and others, Fox’s mother came to the US hoping to create a life far removed from both her time at a camp and as a bomb-carrying subversive. After getting financial help from an American uncle to emigrate, she married in the 1950s and raised a family in New York. While she would often talk proudly to her daughter about her time as an outlaw in Palestine, not a syllable was ever spoken about the great drama that came before, a decision that could be seen by some fellow survivors as its own kind of Holocaust denial. In a similar way, when her mother was told she had cancer in the 1990s, she ordered her family never to tell a soul. “One of her biggest worries was to be seen as a figure of pity,” Fox said. “She never wanted to be seen as a victim of any kind.”
As to why she sustained her lies throughout her life, even to her husband, Fox can only speculate. “There were probably many layers of shame in her,” she said. “Shame about having survived the camp, shame about whatever sexual abuse she experienced, which I can never know for sure, and shame about discovering at one point that she had been a love child, which was why she had changed her name.”
Fox admits to having experienced doubts about revealing secrets her mother fought her whole life to conceal. “My brothers said: ‘Doesn’t mom have a right to retain her privacy?’” she said. “But at the end of the day, who wants to hide from themselves? You only do that because you feel bad about something that happened to you, something so horrific that you feel that people won’t understand. Clearly, she never came to peace with that, but I feel like deep down my mother would have liked to have told me. Don’t we all want to be at peace with who we are?”
Beyond her own story, Fox believes her mother’s saga can also help others. “I made this film so women who survive these horrific experiences during war don’t feel guilty,” she said. “Shame needs to change sides. The shame doesn’t belong to the women. It belongs to the men who did this to them.”
My Underground Mother is screening at the New York Jewish festival on 19 and 20 January before a wider release later this year
