When journalist Marisa Fox was a young girl, her mother would regale her with stories of her own youth, all of which roiled with drama and consequence. When she was a 13-year-old girl living in Poland in the late 1930s, on the brink of the Nazi occupation, her mother told her she was pulled away from her mother and put on a boat to Palestine where she spent the rest of the second world war. As a teenager in that country, she said she became part of a radical Jewish underground group for whom she acted as a spy and a saboteur, smuggling bombs and guns which they used against the British army who ran the country at the time and who they very much wanted to force out. “I was a hero,” her mother would often boast, “never a victim.”
Stories like those both dazzled and horrified the young Fox, but by the time she was nine she began to realize that certain parts of the tale didn’t add up. “I would say to her: ‘Wait a minute, if you were born in 1935 and [the second world war] started in 1939, you would have been four, not 13,’” Fox said. “Whenever I would say that, she would say: ‘No more questions.’”
