For fifty years, she had no name. She was known only as "the girl with headscarf," a frightened face staring out from a train wagon in footage filmed in 1944.
The image came from a transport leaving Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, bound for Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. For decades, everyone who saw it assumed the girl was a Dutch Jew.
In the Netherlands, her picture became as famous as the photograph of Anne Frank, another victim of the Nazis. But the identity of the girl with the fearful glance remained a mystery.
In the early 1990s, that identity was finally discovered. Her name was Settela Steinbach. She was born in 1934 in Buchten, the Netherlands.
She was not Jewish. She was a Dutch Sinti girl, part of the Romani people.
Her father worked as a trader and a violinist. Her mother ran the household and raised the children.
Their life changed in May 1940, when Germany invaded the Netherlands and began its occupation of the country. Like the Jews, the Romani people were persecuted by the Nazis.
At Westerbork, Settela's head was shaved as a preventive measure against head lice. That is why she wore a scarf made from a rather torn sheet around her young, bald head.
The Nazi regime viewed Sinti and Romani people as racial "inferiors" who would threaten the biological purity of the so-called superior Aryan race. This is the reason the Nazis decided she had to die.
It is believed that Settela was executed on August 2, 1944, by lethal cyanide gas, Zyklon B, in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. She died together with her mother, two brothers, two sisters, her aunt, two nephews and her niece.
She was 9 years old. Of the entire Steinbach family, only Settela's father survived.
Anne Frank has become a symbol of the lost promise of the children who died in the Holocaust. May Settela Steinbach, "the girl with headscarf" who did have a name, become a symbol of the Romani and Sinti genocide during the Holocaust.