Bunke Adolf & Frieda (Mudlagk)

Bunke, Adolf Bunke, Frieda During the first years of the war, Ernst and Herta Goldstein and their daughter Evelyn (Evy, b. 1938) were able to remain in their Berlin home. Nevertheless, they were subjected to all the anti-Jewish restrictions, and Ernst and Herta were compelled to perform forced labor. At the beginning of 1943, however, when the last Jews of Berlin were arrested and deported, the family decided to embark on a clandestine existence, which meant living away from home, without personal documents or ration cards. Unfortunately, Ernst Goldstein was caught and deported in August 1943 to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Evy and her mother hid first with Hildegard (Kniess) Arnold and later with Elisabeth Abegg and Lydia Forsstroem (all three were recognized as Righteous by Yad Vashem). Then Evy was sent to Eastern Prussia, where she stayed at the home of Alfred and Frieda Bunke, in Bloestau, near Koenigsberg (today Kaliningrad, Russia). Adolf Bunke was a lawyer, who lived in Glogau, Lower Silesia (today Głogów, Poland). He and his wife were members of the Confessing Church, established to oppose the Nazi regime’s attempts to "Nazify" the Protestant Church. Bunke had become a member of the Nazi party, but in 1935 he officially protested that a Protestant pastor (of Jewish origin) had been vilified by Der Stürmer, the Nazi party propaganda newspaper. Consequently, Bunke was expelled from the party, accused of “preventing the party from battling against the Jewish influence on the fate of the German nation,” and was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1937 he was freed. His family left Glogau and settled in Bloestau. Evy was later joined by her mother at the Bunkes' home. The Bunkes knew they were hiding a Jewish woman and child, but agreed to shelter them, despite the danger, until the area was liberated by the Soviet Army. During the entire period, the Bunkes saw to all the needs of the two refugees, who had neither identificationpapers nor ration cards. After the end of the war, Herta and Evy were unable to prove they were Jewish, and consequently the Russian authorities prevented them from returning to Berlin. They spent another three years in Vilnius, before they returned home in 1948. Two years later, they immigrated to the United States. After the Goldsteins’ survival story was published in Aufbau, a German-Jewish paper, a woman by the name of Eva Gross contacted Evy Goldstein and told her that Bunke had also helped her hide from the Nazis. Unfortunately, contact was subsequently lost with this witness. On December 15, 2009, Yad Vashem recognized Adolf & Frieda Bunke as Righteous Among the Nations.