Grete (Gerda, Gretel) Tockus, geb. Gostinsky (Gostinski)

Grete Gostinsky was born in Munich on April 3, 1908, the eldest daughter of Elias Samuel and Ida Anna Gostinsky. Because her parents came from Łódź, the whole family had Polish citizenship. Grete grew uo with her younger sister Sophie and attended the Luisengymnasium high school from 1921 to September 1923. Nothing is known about any apprenticeship or her working life. On December 22, 1927, when Grete Gostinsky was 19, she married the merchant Walter Tockus who came from Frankfurt am Main. He ran a commission agency in light bulbs and electrical goods at Baaderstrasse 35. Their daughter Ruth was born on March 22, 1931, and their son Ernst on September 28, 1936.
In the hope of escaping from persecution by the Nazis, this Jewish family emigrated to Antwerp in August 1938. Grete Tockus’s parents were also able to flee to Belgium. When Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, Grete Tockus and her family once again found themselves within the reach of the Nazis. The German occupiers interned her, her children, her husband and her parents in the SS assembly camp Mecheln. On January 18, 1943, Grete Tockus, eleven-year-old Ruth and six-year-old Ernst were forced to get into the deportation train that took them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. All three were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon their arrival on January 18, 1943. Grete Tockus’s husband did not survive either. He had already been deported to Auschwitz on October 10, 1942. Of the around 1,700 people on a transport only just over 100 were admitted into the camp; the SS murdered all the rest immediately. It is not known whether Walter Tockus was one of them. It is unclear to this day when and how he died. Grete Tockus’s parents Elias and Ida Gostinsky were probably also murdered in Auschwitz on November 3, 1942. The only member of the family to escape Nazi persecution was Grete Tockus’s sister Sophie. She was able to emigrate to the USA.(Text: Barbara Hutzelmann; editor: C. Fritsche; translation: C. Hales)