Mir aber zerriss es das Herz

Only seven people came when she was buried in 1977. Elisabeth Schmitz, who studied history and theology and was secondary-school teacher at a girls school in Berlin until 1938, returned to her hometown Hanau at the end of the Second World War. Hardly anyone in her hometown knew what she had accomplished in the resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship. She never talked about it. Only in 2004 when a briefcase with personal documents was found in a church cellar, it showed how courageous she had been.In 1935 she wrote an anonymous memorandum to the church appealing to them to officially object against the anti-Jewish hate campaigns, boycotts and persecution. Repeatedly, she reminded the leaders of the church of their task. She wrote letters and requested to act. E. Schmitz took action. She became engaged in a "non-Aryan" Christian group, supported "illegal citizens" and hid Jewish citizens for several years. This biography tells the life of Elisabeth Schmitz, a protesting Protestant, who upheld her resistance against the NS-regime without much fuzz about her own person. Angela Merkel called Elisabeth Schmitz an "exception of the rule of keeping silent". The story of E. Schmitz life is a discovery long-overdue.