Lilli Michalski lived in Görlitz with her husband, the commercial agent Herbert Michalski. She was baptized in 1933, but was nonetheless classified as Jewish by the Nuremberg “race laws.” When Herbert Michalski refused to divorce his wife, he lost his company and moved to Berlin to earn a living. Lilli Michalski and her son Franz moved to her hometown of Breslau (now Wrocław), where her second son Peter was born in 1940.
In October 1944 Lilli and Herbert Michalski were told to report for forced labor. The family went underground and fled to the Austrian region of Styria. The Michalskis eventually placed the children with their former nanny Erna Raack near Görlitz, and sought in vain for a safe hiding place for the family in the Yugoslavian partisan territory.
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, 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.