My Underground Mother (S.F. Jewish Film Festival)

The 45th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 17 – August 3, 2025, will bring more than 65 dynamic independent films to the Bay Area.

KlezCalifornia is a Community Partner for the film My Underground Mother. Twenty years after her mother’s death, journalist Marisa Fox unearths a family secret. She knew her mom as Tamar, the infamous redheaded freedom fighter in British mandate Palestine—not as Hela, a Polish-born survivor of a Jewish women’s forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland. As Marisa delves deeper, she discovers her mother’s writing in a journal written by the camp’s teenage prisoners and tracks them down across the globe. They share a shocking, untold story of sexual trauma and agency, as Marisa reckons with the postwar shaming that fueled her mother’s reinvention. Riveting written and filmed testimonies, striking animation, and compelling vérité footage track a daughter’s search for an unknown mother, revealing a harrowing story of sisterhood and resistance.

My Underground Mother animates and dramatizes a unique diary created by sixty-one teenage girls in a Jewish women’s labor camp. Written in Polish and Yiddish, it includes poems, songs, skits, and even a rewritten Passover Hagode casting the girls as slaves in Gabersdorf, pleading for liberation. The material ranges from innocent to raw and darkly ironic—offering rare, intimate insight into Jewish women’s daily life during the Holocaust.

A central figure in the film is Sara Bialas, a Gabersdorf survivor and Berlin-based Yiddish singer. She returns to the camp, confronting her past. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Sara sings inside the factory where she once worked 12-hour shifts. She was beloved at European Yiddish festivals and mentored younger singers. Sadly, Sara passed during the COVID pandemic, but her musical legacy lives on.

The film also features Yiddish letters, music from the era (like Yiddish tangos), and songs like “My Yidishe Mame,” which the women sang to soothe themselves—blended with original klezmer-inspired compositions.”

This film will be shown at Landmark’s Piedmont Theater (Oakland). Director Marisa Fox and producer Debra Schaffer are expected to attend.

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