Erika Büngener lived with her husband Erich, an interior designer, on Grolmanstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg. She was of Jewish origins, but was able to conceal this fact due to a false statement by her non-Jewish mother. The couple’s two daughters were born in 1943 and 1944. At the request of their Jewish friend Max Mandel, the Büngeners hid Max’s sister Ester Kantorowicz and her husband Kurt from March 1943. When the building they lived in was damaged in an air raid in November 1943, Erika Büngener took the Jewish couple along to stay with her parents. They were able to return to Grolmanstrasse a few days later. From February 1944, they also took in Max Mandel and his 15-year-old son Gert.
On July 19, 1944, Kurt Kantorowicz was arrested in the street by Jewish informers to the Gestapo, known as “catchers.” He was murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of 1944. Despite fearing he might have revealed their hiding place, Ester Kantorowicz and Max and Gert Mandel remained with the Büngeners and were liberated there.
In 1991 Erika and Erich Büngener where honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem.