Peter Michalski lived with his mother and older brother Franz in Breslau (now Wrocław). His mother Lilli Michalski had been baptized for her wedding in 1933. Nonetheless, the Nuremberg “race laws” classified her as Jewish, and Peter and Franz as “Mischlinge” (“half-breeds”). Their father Herbert worked in Berlin to feed the family. He had lost his business when he refused to divorce his wife.
In October 1944 Peter’s parents were told to report for forced labor, and the family went underground. Lilli Michalski fled with the children to the Austrian region of Styria. After several weeks, she placed the children with their former nanny Erna Raack and her parents Ida and Ernst Scharf 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.