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This post describes the murder of a 9-year-old Romani child in Auschwitz-Birkenau and the genocide of the Sinti and Romani people. Shared solely for historical education and remembrance of the forgotten victims of the Holocaust.
“The Girl with the Headscarf” – Settela Steinbach (1934–1944)
Dutch Symbol of the Romani Holocaust
Image
On 19 May 1944, a Dutch newsreel cameraman filmed the deportation train leaving Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands. For one brief second the camera caught a little girl peering fearfully through the gap in a cattle-wagon door. She wore a torn sheet wrapped around her freshly shaven head. For the next fifty years she was known only as “the girl with the headscarf” – an anonymous face that became, alongside Anne Frank, one of the most recognisable images of the Holocaust in the Netherlands.
In 1994, Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar finally discovered her name: Anna Maria “Settela” Steinbach, born 23 December 1934 in Buchten (Limburg), a Sinti Romani girl.
Settela came from a musical family. Her father, Heinrich “Mooth” Steinbach, was a trader and violinist; her mother, Emilia Steinbach, raised ten children. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, everything changed. On 16 May 1944, during the great “Gypsy round-up” (Zigeunerrazzia), the entire family was arrested and sent to Westerbork. Two days later, on 19 May, Settela, her mother, two brothers, two sisters, aunt, two nephews, and niece – nine family members in total – were loaded onto the transport filmed by the newsreel.
Three days later the train arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Because they had been registered as “asocial Gypsies” rather than Jews, the entire Steinbach family was sent directly to the gas chambers on the night of 2–3 August 1944 during the liquidation of the so-called “Gypsy family camp” (Zigeunerfamilienlager). Settela was murdered with Zyklon B together with approximately 4,300 other Sinti and Romani people in that single night. She was nine years old.
Only her father survived the war, liberated from Sachsenhausen in 1945.
Of the estimated 23,000–25,000 Dutch Sinti and Romani, fewer than 200 returned.
We remember Settela Steinbach today not to nurture hatred, but to give back the name and story that were stolen from her for fifty years; to honour the approximately 500,000 Sinti and Romani murdered in the Porajmos – the Devouring – that is still too often forgotten; and to ensure that when we say “Never Again”, we truly mean never again – for Jewish children, for Romani children, for every child.
The girl with the headscarf had a name. Her name was Settela.
Official & reputable sources
NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies – Westerbork transport lists, 19 May 1944
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum – Zigeunerfamilienlager liquidation records, 2–3 August 1944
Wagenaar, Aad – Settela: Het meisje heeft haar naam terug (1995)
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Romani (Gypsy) persecution files
Dutch National Monument Kamp Westerbork – permanent exhibition on Settela Steinbach