‘She Had a Hidden Identity’: New Film Reveals World War II Mother’s Secrets | Documentaries

WWhen journalist Marissa Fox was a young girl, her mother regaled her with stories of her youth, all of which were full of drama and consequences. When she was a 13-year-old girl living in Poland in the late 1930s, on the brink of Nazi occupation, her mother told her that she had been pulled away from her mother and put on a boat to Palestine where she spent the rest of World War II. As a teenager in that country, she said she became part of an underground Jewish extremist group for which she worked as a spy and saboteur, smuggling bombs and weapons that they used against the British army that ran the country at the time and who desperately wanted to expel them. “I was a hero, never a victim,” her mother often boasted.

Stories like these fascinated and terrified the little fox, but when she was nine she began to realize that certain parts of the tale didn’t make sense. “I would say to her: Wait a minute, if you were born in 1935 and… [the second world war] “She started in 1939, you were four years old, not 13. Whenever I said that, she said, ‘No more questions,’” Fox said.

Fox didn’t get any clearer answers from her mother before she died of colon cancer in 1993. Fox, who was a college student at the time, felt not only a sense of loss but also confusion. It wasn’t until 2010 that she received her first glimpse of the truth. She was having tea with her elderly great-aunt, who at the time was suffering from dementia, a condition that Fox believes caused her to inadvertently declare: “Your mother had a hidden identity,” and then add sadly: “You won’t be happy with what you find.”

This news launched a mission at Fox to finally uncover her mother’s true story, a tale that turned out to be more dramatic, troubling, and sadder than the one she had always been fed. That’s the story finally told in a new documentary directed and written by Fox called My Underground Mother. Through relentless investigation over 15 years, during which she tracked down sources from around the world, Fox discovered that her mother had lied to her, as well as her father, her siblings and everyone else in her adult life, about basic information including her real age, her real name, as well as the fact that she had actually lived in Poland for the duration of the war.

Talking to Fox in her New York apartment as she traces her mother’s complicated story has a strange resonance because they share a number of physical traits. “We wear our hair the same way,” she said.

She now believes that’s why her mother was so shaken when Fox entered adolescence. “When she saw my body changing, and saw the male gaze appear on the horizon, she became protective in a way that went beyond the normal limits of Jewish mothers,” Fox said. “She was always nervously trying to tell me to cover up. I didn’t understand it. Her relationship with me began to change and harden.”

Fox believes that her mother was driven by her emerging femininity 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 14 years old and living in a small town near the German border. Her mother ended up being sent to Auschwitz while she and hundreds of other teenage girls in the area were taken to a forced labor camp called Jabersdorf. There, they were imprisoned and forced to work hard shifts to provide free labor and assets that the Nazis used to help finance the war. The direct testimonies that Fox provides in the film are very moving, drawn from dozens of women who were in Jabersdorf and followed them in countries from Sweden and Australia to the United States and Israel. The way it is done forms the main plot of the film, creating a fascinating experience for the viewer. The dozens of women Fox found, 18 of whom appeared in the final cut of the film, were in their 80s and 90s at the time. Since filming began, all but three of these women have died. “Whenever I heard about someone relevant to the story, I would jump on board to talk to them,” Fox said. “There was no time to waste.”

Tracking them down was one thing, but getting them to talk about their most traumatic experiences became a psychological challenge. “I had to earn their trust,” the director said. “A lot of them asked me: ‘Do you love your mother?’ Because they wanted to make sure I wasn’t out to tell a salacious story. After that, there was tension between their loyalty to my mother and how much they felt she had abandoned them by lying about her past. They didn’t understand how she could do this. “These women were everything to each other, and after the war, my mother broke off their relationship.”

In the end, the woman’s role as a witness to history, as well as her past relationship with Fox’s mother, won them over. “They were curious to know what happened to their friend and why she did what she did,” the director said.

The stories women told Fox about Jabersdorf paint a picture of a horrific place that became exponentially worse as the war continued. In a coup, Fox not only had the women’s impressive testimony, but also a magazine she had created at the time, to which 60 girls contributed. The lines Fox’s mother wrote in the journal when she was a teenager are among the most eloquent, as she imagines a defiant future outside the camp, a sign of her deep-rooted survival instincts. “My mother was a badass, even at a young age,” Fox said.

Overwhelmed and frustrated by the workload and isolation, Fox finds some fascinating nuance in the lives of some of the girls through their relationships with some of the British prisoners of war who were later brought to the camp. While the Jewish girls were barely surviving, POWs were allowed to receive Red Cross parcels, including food and chocolate, which they used to entice the girls into having sex. With astonishing frankness, the magazine reveals the defamation that occurred between prisoners of war and some girls. “Anne Frank’s diary wasn’t like that,” Fox jokes in the film.

Interestingly, the women who talk about this topic only talk about relationships with other girls, never themselves. “These girls were very young, so they had no sexual experience before this,” Fox said. “Their lives were completely uprooted, stripped of their humanity completely when they started feeling those raging hormones. When all of a sudden, a man wants you, in that context it becomes exciting. Of course, sex swapping is a war crime and some girls may have reported consenting to sex just to prove they had power, but there can also be love and lust. Many women later married these captives.”

But two years after their imprisonment, the sexual side of life in the camp took a much darker turn. In 1943, as the Nazi killing apparatus became more active, SS men and women took control of the camp. They instituted practices such as strip searches where guards would select certain women to be trafficked as sex slaves to Nazi soldiers on the Eastern Front. “These women who were taken from the camp were never heard from again,” Fox says.

Other girls in the camp were raped there, turning the place into a kind of “Joy Division” brothel in places like Auschwitz, a gruesome practice later referenced in the 1953 novel House of Dolls by novelist and camp survivor Ka-Tzetnik 135633, as well as by the name of the dark post-punk band Ian Curtis led in the late 1970s. In the film, Fuchs reveals the horrors that some girls experienced in Jabersdorf, including one who was killed because she became pregnant as a result of rape.

No record of the sex crimes committed by the Nazis was kept, which is a striking feature considering the fact that the Germans left incredibly detailed documentation of their other crimes, which is the main reason we know so much about them. Fuchs believes that one reason the Nazis omitted sexual crimes was because it was illegal for non-Jews to have sexual relations with Jews. “It was considered a racial desecration,” she added.

In 1945, when the war finally ended, the incidents of rape did not stop. Russian editors at Jabersdorf also violated the girls. Even after Fox’s mother arrived in Italy on her way to Palestine, one of the men tried to use sexual coercion in exchange for his help.

Due to the treatment her mother received in Poland, when she finally arrived in Palestine, she wanted to remake herself and joined a rebellion that eventually had a hand in creating the State of Israel. Although her mother always considered herself 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’s founding, Holocaust survivors were often viewed in the country with suspicion and condescension or viewed as damaged goods. For this and other reasons, Fox’s mother came to the United States hoping to create a life far removed from her time in the camp and as a bomb-wielding subversive leader. After receiving financial assistance from her American uncle to immigrate, she married in the 1950s and raised a family in New York. While she often spoke proudly with her daughter about her time as an outlaw in Palestine, not a syllable was spoken about the great drama that had gone before, a decision that could be viewed by some of her fellow survivors as a kind of Holocaust denial. Likewise, when her mother was told she had cancer in the 1990s, she instructed her family never to tell anyone. “One of her biggest fears was that she would be seen as a pathetic figure,” Fox said. “She never wanted to be seen as a victim of any kind.”

As for why she continued her lies her whole life, even to her husband, she could only speculate. “There were probably many layers of shame inside her,” she said. “Shame that she survived the camp, shame about any sexual abuse she suffered, which I can’t know for sure, shame about discovering that she was a lovechild, which is why she changed her name.”

Fox admits she felt doubts about revealing the secrets her mother had fought her whole life to hide. “My brothers said, ‘Doesn’t my mother have the right to her privacy?’” she said. “But at the end of the day, who wants to hide from themselves? You’re only doing it because you feel bad about something that happened to you, something so terrible that you feel like people won’t understand. Obviously she’s never come to terms with it, but deep down I feel like my mother would have liked to have told me that. Don’t we all want to be at peace with who we are?”

In addition to her own story, Fox believes her mother’s story can help others, too. “I made this film so that women who survived these horrific experiences during the war would not feel guilty,” she said. “Shame needs to change sides. Shame doesn’t belong to women. It belongs to the men who did this to them.”