Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua grew up never knowing that her mother was a Holocaust survivor. That is, until a series of discoveries after her mother’s death led her to the truth: her mother had survived Gabersdorf, a slave labor camp for Jewish girls and young women, for four and a half years – and had never said a word about it.

With the help of USC Shoah Foundation, Fox-Bevilacqua not only learned the history of this little-known camp but also set out to make a documentary film about her mother’s past and the hidden stories of the women who survived alongside her. The film, By a Thread, is in its final stages of production and Fox-Bevilacqua hopes to debut it next year.

Fox-Bevilacqua, a journalist, said she knew her grandmother and other relatives had been killed in Auschwitz, but her mother never spoke about her own childhood experiences during World War II. But 17 years after she died, Fox-Bevilacqua learned from cousins that her mother actually had been born with entirely different name – Hela Hocherman – and was nine years older than she said she was. Fox-Bevilacqua traveled to Poland to track down her mother’s birth certificate, and when she returned to New York, contacted JRI-Poland genealogists Jeff Cymbler and Stanley Diamond who connected her with the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross to learn that Hela had been a prisoner of a camp called Gabersdorf, in what was then Sudetenland, for four and a half years, beginning when she was 14.

Cymbler’s aunt had also been a Gabersdorf prisoner and had written in a diary that survivor Regina Honigman in Melbourne, Australia, kept. After she died, her daughter Fay Eichenbaum discovered the journal and found that 60 other women wrote in it. Cymbler wrote to Eichenbaum and two days later, Fox-Bevilacqua received a page her mother had written at Gabersdorf in 1942. The diary literally opened the book on this hidden chapter and linked Fox-Bevilacqua to other survivors and their families. The diary is now stored at Yad Vashem.

“It was shocking,” Fox-Bevilacqua said of her discovery of her mother's secret. “It was so sad to feel that she felt somehow ashamed about this.”

Gabersdorf was part of vast, underground network of 200 Nazi forced labor camp called Organization Schmelt in Silesia and Sudetenland, the majority of which were all-women’s. Gabersdorf was one of 11 all-women’s camps in Trutnov, Czech Republic, then known as Trautenau, Sudetenland. These camps were located near factories under Nazi control that produced goods for the Nazi war effort, including thread for Nazi uniforms. Jewish girls as young as 11 or 12 up to age 30 were forced to work and live at the factories as slaves, often alongside locals who were treated as normal employees.

The camps were the last to be liberated, on May 8-9, 1945 – nearly four months after the liberation of Auschwitz. Sexual assault and rape were common at the camps, and prisoners at the camps in Silesia were sent on a death march near the end of the war.

Determined to learn more about what her mother had gone through, Fox-Bevilacqua and her network of second generation survivors started a spreadsheet of all the survivors began doing more research. One book she turned to was by Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research: Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938-1944.

She also went to Columbia University, which has full access to the 55,000 testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, to watch testimonies of Trutnov camp survivors.

“What I saw really blew my mind,” she said. “These women were talking about their families, what life was like at the camps. I started getting to know their faces.”

Fox-Bevilacqua also received help from Ita Gordon, consultant at USC Shoah Foundation and an expert on the Visual History Archive. Gordon helped Fox-Bevilacqua find the maiden names and interview locations of the survivors in the VHA, which Fox-Bevilacqua compared to an official list of camp prisoners in order to track down survivors she could interview for her documentary. The two also curated an exhibit of testimony clips for the anniversary of the liberation last year.

Ultimately, Fox-Bevilacqua was able to interview dozens of women who had survived the camps, some of whom even knew her mother. She discovered that many of them carried great shame and guilt about their time in the camps – for helping the Nazi war effort (albeit against their will), for the sexual violence they were subjected to, for surviving in Trutnov while other family members died elsewhere, and even for being told they hadn't suffered as much as those in Auschwitz and other death camps so they shouldn't talk about their experiences.

She hopes her documentary will help to de-stigmatize sexual violence in the Holocaust and start an open dialogue about the patterns of violence that exist across many genocides. She also wants to highlight the many small acts of resistance these young women engaged in, to celebrate their bravery and courage in a place few people today even know existed.

Her own mother died while holding onto many secrets about her past, but Fox-Bevilacqua hopes her film helps other survivors of genocide and sexual violence have the courage to share their stories without shame.

“Schindler’s List, with its subplot of Helen Hirsch, a Jewish woman abused by Amon Goeth, SS commandant of Krakow-Płaszow camp, and USC Shoah Foundation did so much to embolden women to speak up for the first time,” Fox-Bevilacqua said. “[I hope to] help any survivor not to hold it in, to know that it wasn't your fault. My mother hid her past, partly because she didn’t want to be perceived as a victim. Knowing what she had to overcome makes her more of a hero to me, not less of one.”

To donate to By A Thread’s fundraising campaign, click here.