“Because our ancestors, our parents missed it. And then it was all too late.”

Petra Michalski, a spellbinding storyteller, urges listeners to act with courage, in good times and bad

by Toby Axelrod

Petra Michalski (nee Ulrich) is a messenger of history. What started out as listening to the life story of her husband, Franz, has become a mission to share their message of hope and activism with younger generations in Germany.

In 2008 Petra and Franz Michalski began telling his story of survival under the Nazis to visitors at Berlin’s Silent Heroes Memorial. The memorial honors people who rescued Jews, including those who helped Franz’ family. For a couple of years, the couple spoke at schools and memorials around the country. After Franz suffered a stroke in 2010, Petra continued, meeting with some 200 groups a year. And she has carried on alone after his death in 2023.

His story “became mine,” says Petra, who hopes to inspire listeners. “When they go home, they should see if they can help somewhere, do something useful,” she says.

After one such meeting, a student told her he had decided to volunteer for the Red Cross and was bringing his girlfriend with him. After all, “you said we should do something sensible and not just look at our cell phones,” he said.

Whether volunteering to help refugees or speaking out against antisemitism, it’s important to act “in good time,” Petra tells her listeners. “Because our ancestors, our parents missed it. And then it was all too late.”

Petra Michalski was born in April 1937 in Hamburg and grew up in a mixed immigrant (Argentine) Jewish/Christian household. As a child during the Nazi era, her family hid the fact that her step-grandfather, Mátyás Plesch, was Jewish, and that her mother’s roots were with the Guaraní people of Argentina.

“Nobody was supposed to know that because that was also considered ‘worthless life’” by the Nazis, Petra recalls. Mátyás Plesch was arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and died a year later due to the abuse he suffered.

“It doesn’t hurt at all”

She vividly recalls hiding with her mother in a shelter during Allied air raids. And she will never forget how her father, a weapons trainer, told her mother she must never fall into the hands of Russian soldiers. “When the children are asleep in the evening, you turn on the gas tap and tomorrow morning it will all be over. And it doesn't hurt at all,” her father said.

“I remembered those words: ‘It doesn't hurt at all.’ And then of course I thought, I can't tell anyone what I heard. I eavesdropped on my parents, and that was the worst thing you could do!”

In the last days of the war, Petra’s mother gave a German soldier 500 cigarettes that her father had received over time while in the military to smuggle her and the children to Hamburg, where they slowly rebuilt their lives.

In 1953, when she met Franz Michalski at a party, 16-year-old Petra was immediately sympathetic to his survival story. “We talked about it from the beginning,” she says. “My mother was also very curious: ‘Oh, another Jewish person in our family!’ And so his story grew bigger and fuller within me, too. Until I finally knew everything.”

Born in October 1934 in Breslau — then part of Germany but now the city of Wroclaw in Poland — Franz was the son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. His mother converted, to protect her family. “But a year later, Hitler made her Jewish again,” says Petra, referring to the racial laws under the Nazis.

With sons Franz and Peter, the Michalskis moved from place to place. They survived the war with the help of several non-Jews. “We call them silent heroes,” says Petra.

As teenagers, Petra and Franz confided in each other, became friends, and discovered they both loved American jazz music and dancing. At a party, “he asked me, of all people, to dance, and stomped on my big toe so hard on the first step that I could only whimper in pain.”

Nevertheless, she told him “you really dance fantastically well. And he said, ‘Well, then we can always dance together.’”

They married and raised two children in Hamburg, where they lived until the late 1960s. In 1969 they moved to Baden-Württemberg, where Franz Michalski worked as managing director of a pharmaceutical company. After he retired in 1993, he and Petra moved to Berlin, where he had spent part of his childhood. 

The past was always in the background. But sometimes it reared its ugly head.

For example, after the war, Petra’s father and uncles wanted to sell the house that had belonged to their Jewish stepfather, Mátyás Plesch. The official at the local land registry in Hamburg looked at their papers and got angry, she says. “He slammed it all on the table and said, ‘Man, that's Jewish property! We really did miss out on it.’ In other words, the same person who was previously involved in taking away the Jews' land and houses was still sitting there.”

She and Franz were always a bit cautious. “When we met new people we would… steer the conversation” to the Nazi period. “And from their reaction we realized, ‘Well, we don't want to have anything to do with them, do we?’”

Some acquaintances hid their prejudices well. In the 1970s, in dinner conversation at their home with a longtime business partner, Franz suggested he contact a potential client in Holland.

“He’s a Jew,” the man said. “I would never live under the same roof as a Jew.”

“I froze in shock,” Petra recalls. Franz “had a 100 percent poker face, and I was so annoyed that he took it like that. I went into the kitchen, opened the drawer, had a knife in my hand, I closed it again. Then I picked up the frying pan, the grill pan — the heaviest one I have.”

Before she could turn around, Franz came in to calm her down, saying, ‘We don't talk about it at all. We don't say anything.’” Petra had a different idea. “Sometimes, if you stay calm and actually talk, there can be a positive result. But in this case, he didn't want to. Franz didn't want to talk about it at all,” she says. 

“You’re telling me!”

Then, in September 2006, something happened that cracked his shell of silence. The Michalskis attended an event at the German Resistance Memorial Center. Evelyn Woods, née Goldstein, a Jewish survivor living in the United States, was speaking about hiding in Berlin during the Nazi era. 

Woods also spoke of the postwar antisemitism she experienced in Germany. At that point Franz stood up and said, for the first time in public, “You’re telling me!”

“And then there was silence,” says Petra. When Woods finished speaking, three or four historians came over, asking Franz to explain. “I myself was a child gone underground,” he answered, and shared details about his family’s ordeal.

Two years later, in 2008, the story of the Michalski family and their rescuers became one of the first accounts shared in Berlin’s newly opened Silent Heroes Memorial. The Michalskis immediately began telling Franz’s story to visiting pupils there, as well as at other memorials and schools across Germany. 

Franz and Petra campaigned for the rescuers of the Michalski family to be honored at the Yad Vashem memorial. On October 29, 2012, the Israeli Holocaust memorial added the names of Gerda Mez and Erna Raack and their parents Ida and Ernst Scharf to their list of "Righteous Among the Nations."

Franz’s personal mission might have come to a halt after he suffered a stroke in 2010. Public speaking was now difficult. But Petra became his voice, sharing his story, with him by her side. Fortunately, “he had written down his story and mine, so that was all good and solid,” Petra recalls. 

In more recent years, she also addressed orientation classes for young refugees from such countries as Syria, Egypt, and Iran. “They listen to our story and at the end I always ask ‘And what did you learn about the Jews in your countries?’ They often start to cry: ‘Only the worst, only the most terrible things.’

“They are surprised that we are actually just like them. And they are just like us,” says Petra. “There are just some things that we disagree on. Most of the time they are religious things.”

“With rapt attention.”

When she speaks to German students, they sometimes wonder: “It's strange that my grandmother has never told me anything about what the Nazi era was like. Why not?” says Petra. And they vow to go home and ask, for the first time.

In 2013 Franz’s autobiography was published in German, later in English: “When the Gestapo Rang the Front Doorbell: A family in a Mixed Marriage and Those Who Helped Them (Als die Gestapo an der Haustür klingelte: Eine Familie in „Mischehe“ und ihre Helfer). He had written the first draft in 1994 at the urging of his niece, Milena. It had been meant only for family. Now, it was part of the Michalskis’ joint educational work.

In 2014 Berliner Marie Rolshoven met the couple during a visit by schoolchildren at the Silent Heroes Memorial, where she worked. “I was incredibly impressed and touched. Petra Michalski narrated, as Franz Michalski was not really able to do so due to his stroke,” Rolshoven, a 2024 Obermayer Award winner, recalls. “The students sat in their chairs with rapt attention.”

After one such meeting, a 12-year-old boy from Hamburg wrote that he hoped that such a terrible time would never come again, Rolshoven says. “But if it does happen and they have to hide again, they should please come to him. He will then hide Petra and Franz at his house.”

In 2018 Rolshoven made a documentary film about the couple’s work, called “When the Gestapo Rang the Doorbell: The Michalski Family and Their Silent Heroes.” (Als die Gestapo an der Haustür klingelte — Die Familie Michalski und ihre Stillen Helden).

Petra participates regularly in Rolshoven’s Denk Mal Am Ort project — a German play on words that means “Think about this place” and “Memorial on Site” — that she started together with her late mother, Jani Pietsch. Every year around the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, people open their homes in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich to host events, many involving eyewitnesses and survivors.

For Petra, it is Hamburg that tugs at the heartstrings. She has volunteered regularly for Denk Mal am Ort there, speaking in the Hoheluft sports center, which overlooks the site on the street Butenfeld where her step-grandfather, Mátyás Plesch, lived. In 2015 a stumbling stone memorial was installed in front of the site where his home once stood.

“You could always look directly at our house” from the sports club, she recalls. “When there was a soccer game… our house was always full because everyone wanted to be up in the attic apartment so they could watch the game.”

Now, “from the third floor [of the club] I can always look over to where our house used to be. And that's where I tell my story,” she says.

In 2023, Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner honored the couple with a Federal Cross of Merit for their work in sharing their history.

And Petra continues to touch the souls of thousands of people, young and old. 

“Petra doesn't give up,” says Uwe Neumärker, director of the Berlin-based Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. “She now explains things on her own, despite the pain of her loss.” 

The core of Petra’s message is that “courage is possible even in dark times and is necessary every day in a democracy, all the more so in the face of growing, increasingly blatant antisemitism and brutalizing language,” Neumärker adds.

The couple had fought “for remembrance, against antisemitism and racism with great commitment for many years,” notes Karoline Georg, director of the Silent Heroes Memorial and the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind Museum at the German Resistance Memorial Foundation. “The fact that Petra Michalski is now continuing this commitment is a great gain for the… Memorial and for society as a whole.” 

Since audiences always want to know how she and Franz met, Petra tells them about the 1953 party where they first took to the dance floor.

“He didn't just trample on one of my big toes, but the other one too,” she laughs. “And whenever he danced with another girl, I always sat there and waited for the scream of pain. Never, never did he step on another woman’s toes. Never.”

When she tells her story to schoolchildren, she gets plenty of positive feedback. “The children say to me when I leave the school, ‘Oh, please, stay a little longer!... It's much better than when the teacher reads something to us from the history book. Please tell us more.’

“And I always praise them afterward. I say, ‘I noticed that no one was looking at their cell phone, no one was talking to their neighbor. You're all listening, and no one has fallen asleep. That's a really great thing for me, that you listened. And if just one of you continues to tell this story, then that's my greatest reward.’”

— Obermayer Award recipient 2025