For decades, a single frame of film held the face of a nameless child. The footage, shot in 1944, showed a young girl peering out from a crowded cattle car. She wore a headscarf, and her expression was one of pure fear.
The image became famous in the Netherlands, as iconic as the photograph of Anne Frank. For fifty years, the world assumed the girl was a Dutch Jew. She was known only as "the girl with headscarf," a symbol of the persecution of the Jewish people.
In the early 1990s, her identity was finally uncovered. The girl’s name was Settela Steinbach. She was born in 1934 in Buchten, the Netherlands.
She was not Jewish. Settela was a Dutch Sinti girl, part of the Romani people.
Her father worked as a trader and a violinist. Her mother managed the household and raised the children. Their lives changed in May 1940 when Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands.
Like the Jews, the Romani people were also targeted by the Nazis. While held at the Westerbork transit camp, Settela’s head was shaved to prevent head lice. This is why she wore a scarf, actually a torn sheet, around her young head.
The Nazi regime viewed Sinti and Romani people as racially inferior. They were considered a threat to the biological purity of the Aryan race. This ideology sealed Settela’s fate.
It is believed that Settela was executed on August 2, 1944. She was killed by lethal cyanide gas, Zyklon B, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz concentration camp.
She died alongside her mother, two brothers, two sisters, her aunt, two nephews, and her niece. She was only nine years old. Of the entire Steinbach family, only Settela’s father survived the war.
Anne Frank has long symbolized the lost promise of children who died in the Holocaust. Now, Settela Steinbach, the girl with the headscarf who finally has a name, stands as a symbol of the Romani and Sinti genocide.