Franz Michalski lived with his family in Görlitz. His mother Lilli Michalski had been baptized for her wedding in 1933. However, she was still classified by the Nuremberg “race laws” as Jewish, and her also baptized son Franz was considered a “Mischling” (“half-breed”). Since Franz’s father Herbert refused to divorce his wife, he lost his company and moved to Berlin to earn a living. Lilli Michalski and Franz moved to her hometown of Breslau (now Wrocław), where her second son Peter was born in 1940.
In October 1944, Franz’s parents were told to report for forced labor. The family went underground. Lilli Michalski fled with the children to the Austrian Styria region. After several weeks, she placed the children with their former nanny Erna Raack in Thiemendorf near Görlitz.
Gerda Mez, a colleague of Herbert Michalski, hid the entire family in her hotel room in Tetschen-Bodenbach (now Děčín) from February 1945. At the end of March, ten-year-old Franz narrowly managed to stop his desperate mother from drowning herself and four-year-old Peter in the River Elbe. They survived, and returned to Berlin on foot in the summer of 1945.