My Underground Mother

Documentary - USA - English - 89 minutes

New York Jewish Film Festival, Hamptons Doc Fest, Fort Lauderdale (Best Documentary)

“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, now 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 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 wife and mother in America. A real-life story of a daughter coming to terms with a woman who went to extraordinary lengths to not be defined by trauma.