Erna Scharf began working as a maid and nanny for the Michalski family in Görlitz at the end of 1934. Lilli Michalski was of Jewish origin. When the Michalskis moved to Breslau at the start of 1939, Erna Scharf remained in Thiemendorf near Görlitz. Her father Ernst Scharf, a convinced anti-Nazi, had rented a farm there. Erna Scharf married Herbert Raack in April 1943 and in July 1943 had her son Karl-Heinz, who died of medication poisoning in July 1945.
At the beginning of November 1944, Herbert Michalski took his two sons Franz and Peter, at risk as “Jewish Mischlinge” (“half-breeds”), to Erna Raack, who was living with her parents in Thiemendorf. In early February 1945, searches for deserters and escaped prisoners intensified in the area around Thiemendorf, and the children were no longer safe. The Scharf family informed Lilli and Herbert Michalski and they picked up their sons in mid-February.
The Michalskis and Raack remained friends for a lifetime. Erna Raack and her parents Ernst and Ida Scharf were posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 2012.