When Viktor Frankel wrote “Man’s Search for Meaning” in 1946, he set out to answer this question: “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?”
When journalist and magazine editor Marisa Fox brings her new documentary “My Underground Mother” to Chatham, N.Y., this Sunday at noon, she addresses a different question: “What’s the price of silence?”
Screening at the freshly renovated Crandell Theatre, Fox’s search for meaning is part of FilmColumbia 2025. A nationally recognized film event, FilmColumbia is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Fitting then that Marisa Fox herself has been working on her gripping new investigative and personal documentary for over 25 years.
As writer, director, and producer of “My Underground Mother,” she makes it her mission to unlock hidden Holocaust history. Specifically, Fox sets out to decode her mother’s many mysteries.
Launching one woman’s search for meaning decades after her mother’s death, Fox is shocked to learn just how much her mother never revealed. Seen through the lens of chronic complex trauma, it is no wonder why.
For instance, Fox writes her mother’s name was Tamar; this is the identity she apparently chose for herself. Yet the woman Fox thinks of as Tamar also had a Yiddish name on her birth record and later went by a Hebrew name writing in journals.
Who was Tamar? And why did she say she was “never in the Holocaust”?
I interviewed Fox this week to understand how she sees her underground mother now. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
SARAH WRIGHT
What did your mother write in the Gabersdorf journal that struck you the most?
MARISA FOX
First, I was blown away by the line ‘we are in a concentration camp,’ which was yet more proof of her wartime whereabouts and that she was a Holocaust survivor, which she firmly denied. Then I was taken by her eloquence when she was just 15 years old, a year into her imprisonment at Gabersdorf, working 12-plus-hour shifts, exhausted, starving, trying to survive in a void of inhumanity but retaining her own by writing. Then I was struck by the line ‘We are left to the whims of our “honorable” leader.’
It was sarcastic, and she seemed to be alluding to the sexual abuses more graphically documented on other pages by her fellow teenage inmates. And she wrote with such determination to prevail over her oppressors: ‘The smoldering flames of despair will burn out and fade into fleeting sparks. Only these dusty pages will remain and remind you of the terrible tragicomedy playing out within these bleak camp walls.’
What teenager uses words like ‘tragicomedy’? These were highly educated girls, the first generation of Jewish girls in Poland to attend public school, attend high school, and even college and beyond.
When I interviewed my mother’s best friend, she told me how when the Nazis invaded and banned them from attending school or going to the library, they shared books, sometimes ripping them in half with one girl getting the first half of the book, and the other the ending.
As an example, she offered Proust. They were just about to start eighth grade when the war broke out. My mother was an avid reader, so hearing this story made perfect sense.
Lastly, my mother signed her name in Hebrew, which had just been reborn as a modern language by Zionist writers, publishers who dreamed of a land where Jews could live free, without threat of persecution, self-reliantly on communal farms (kibbutzes), so to me, seeing her signature in Hebrew was another beautiful act of defiance. Writing Hebrew in a Nazi camp? I saw the seeds of the freedom fighter she would become.
WRIGHT
Do you think your mother’s concealment of her Holocaust survivorship helped save her life?
FOX
I think it was vital to her self-preservation. Holocaust survivors were denigrated as crazy and ‘damaged goods’ when they spoke about their experiences. Who could believe such atrocities?
And because they were so terribly abused, reduced to skeletal figures, many of them suffering physical ailments from the tortures they endured, aged beyond their years, they were viewed as outcasts, blamed for their own victimhood—and often by their own people! In a young Israel, they were treated like pariahs, asked: ‘Why did you go like lambs to the slaughter?’
Women were doubly shamed, often asked: ‘Who did you sleep with to survive?’ And if you engaged in sexual barter to survive, imagine the shame. To clarify, there were various male figures at the camp, including POWs who received care packages from the Red Cross.
As one of our main characters reveals, if you received a ‘gift’ from a POW, whether a piece of chocolate or soap, and if you accepted it, they expected sex in return. This was decades before conflict-related sexual barter was deemed a war crime. And as the diary reveals, some female prisoners had trysts, whether out of necessity (food or medicine for themselves or an ailing friend or sister), out of boredom (think of any incarcerated population), or because they genuinely found love (yes, a few married their POW ‘sweethearts’).
And of course, rape and various forms of sexual humiliation were woven in their daily existence. So couple the shame of sexual violation with survivor’s guilt and it is easy to understand why my mother chose to deny that chapter. In addition, survivors just wanted to move forward, and how could you if you were mired in the past?
WRIGHT
Many survivors of rape and other criminal sexual violence keep this to themselves, too. Is it not self-protective?
FOX
Absolutely. Rape cuts deeper than just about any other sort of trauma. It’s a violation of the soul, the self—it’s the ultimate loss of control and, in many cultures, a source of shame for the whole family. And if your family was murdered in the Holocaust and the only surviving member spoke of being raped, she was told to keep it under wraps so as not to dishonor the dead.
But this isn’t just a matter of Jewish traditions of modesty and the Holocaust as you rightly point out. Look at the Chibok girls from Nigeria who returned from Boko Haram captivity with babies born from rape. They were deemed outcasts and shunned by their own parents and families. In addition, traumatic memory prevents survivors of rape from retrieving the details of what happened. Perhaps it’s an early protective shield that enables survivors to move on.
Eventually, though, physical sensations or locations tend to trigger memories of the traumatic event. And then being able to retrieve the fragments of memory and assemble them into a cohesive whole becomes the key to recovery. But that takes years and a lot of work, though there have been tremendous strides in healing techniques.
WRIGHT
What would justice look like for your mother and other survivors of Nazi-run Jewish women’s camps?
FOX
It’s too late to apprehend and prosecute perpetrators of Holocaust-era sexual violence, but it isn’t too late to restore the voices of the women who were bold enough to speak their truths.
Justice to me means recognizing that sexual violence took place during the Holocaust and incorporating the story of Jewish women’s camps and the plight and agency of its survivors into mainstream Holocaust history. Right now, there’s only one museum in the world that includes Jewish women’s camps into their permanent exhibits, and that’s the Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, Australia.
I also made a point of honoring the wishes of Sara Bialas, the Berlin-residing survivor who took me to Gabersdorf and wanted the mayor of Trutnov, Czech Republic, to put a plaque up at the location of the camp. Not only did he agree, his deputy suggested we honor the survivors of all 10 Jewish women’s camps, and we unveiled a monument that documented that story.
So justice isn’t necessarily about imprisoning anyone at this point. Unfortunately, as last-living Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told me in the film, rape as a war crime was tossed out at that historic trial because of pressure from the Russians, who viewed rape as a reward as they liberated Europe. German women became their prey, but so did Jewish inmates, who were targeted in the no-man’s land that was postwar Europe and beyond.
So justice to me means recognizing that women’s experiences differ greatly from men’s during the war, whether they are caught in crosshairs of a war or fleeing from it as migrant women. Justice means awareness and implementing measures to safeguard women and girls and providing them with reparations so they can restart their lives after such devastation.
WRIGHT
What is the price of silence?
FOX
On a personal basis, it cost me my relationship with my mother. Because she concealed such a huge piece of herself, she couldn’t be whole or transparent or open with me. So I didn’t have that close mother-daughter relationship I always wanted with her and that I try to have with my daughter and my sons.
It also meant my mother lived her postwar years partly in fear of being discovered or ‘outed.’ I think of how I grew up on Riverside Drive right by a memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Every year, survivors and their families gather to honor the memory of those lost there, and my mother’s own uncle was a rabbi in the Warsaw Ghetto, but she never attended. And when I asked her why, she’d avoid the topic or come up with some excuse.
So silence or silencing cost her a chance to live whole, to mourn for her family and her community, to heal, and to forgive herself for having survived. Who knows if she would have died as young as she did. I think it must have become impossible to lead such a conflicting existence.
On a larger scale, silence cost us women’s history, a chance to correct the ills of the past and learn from history and to empower a new generation of women and girls. You can’t build a future if you don’t know your past.
We must put women back in the story because we’ve always been there, as agents of change, as survivors of gender-based atrocities, and as forces capable of rising from our traumas and rebounding with empathy, grace, and strength. But we’ll never have that chance if we’re silenced, denied our chance to tell our stories, and to have others listen to us—for a change!
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Woman on the Verge is attending FilmColumbia 2025 and looking forward to seeing “My Underground Mother.” A discussion with Fox and producer Deborah Shaffer will follow the 86-minute screening.
