Execution of Settela Steinbach - Duch Symbol of Children Holocaust and Romani Holocaust
For 50 years this girl had no name and was known only as “the girl with headscarf”. From the release of this footage taken in 1944 when she was put on a transport from Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, for 50 years everybody thought that she was a Dutch Jew. In the Netherlands her picture is as famous as the picture of Anne Frank, another Nazi victim.
But who was this girl with fearful glance staring out of the wagon that became a symbol of the persecution of the Jews?
In the early 1990s the identity of “the girl with headscarf” was discovered – her name was Settela Steinbach, she was born in 1934 in Buchten, the Netherlands and she was not a Jewish but a Dutch Sinti girl which is part of the Romani people. Her father worked as a trader and a violinist and her mother ran household and raised children.
Their life changed in May 1940 when Germany invaded the Netherlands and started to occupy the country. Like the Jews, also the Romani people were persecuted by Nazis. In Westerbork, Settela’s head was shaved as a preventive measure against head lice. That is why she wore a torn sheet around her head to cover her bald head.
Nazi regime viewed Sinti and Romani people as racial "inferiors" who would threaten the biological purity of superior Aryan race.
This is the reason why Nazis decided that she had to die.
It is believed that Settela was executed on August 2, 1944 by lethal cyanide gas Zyklon B in gas chambers in Auschwitz concentration camp together with her mother, two brothers, two sisters, aunt, two nephews and her niece. She was 9 years old. Of the entire Steinbach’s family, only Settela’s father survived
While Anne Frank has become a symbol for the lost promise of the children who died in the Holocaust, may Settela Steinbach, “the girl with headscarf” who did have a name, become symbol of the Romani and Sinti genocide during the Holocaust.
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