The Girl In The White Headscarf
Updated: Sep 3
For seven seconds, a small girl looks out through the half-open door of a freight wagon. A white cloth is wrapped around her head. Somewhere off camera, her mother calls her back inside, and the door slides shut. The train pulls away from Westerbork transit camp and doesn't stop until Auschwitz-Birkenau.
That clip became one of the most reproduced images of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, used in documentaries and textbooks for nearly fifty years under a single caption: the girl with the headscarf. Everyone assumed she was Jewish. She wasn't, and it took a journalist's decade-long search to find out who she actually was.
Quick Answers
● Who was the girl in the white headscarf? Anna Maria ‘Settela’ Steinbach, a nine-year-old Dutch Sinti girl deported from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 19 May 1944.
● Why was she wearing a headscarf? Her head had been shaved on arrival at Westerbork, a standard and deliberately degrading practice, and she covered it with a torn strip of cloth.
● How was she identified? Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar spent years tracing the wagon number and survivor testimony, and in the early 1990s a Sinti woman named Crasa Wagner confirmed her name.
● What happened to her family? Her mother, several siblings, an aunt, and other relatives were murdered alongside her. Only her father survived the war.
A Family on the Road
Anna Maria Steinbach, known to her family as Settela, was born on 23 December 1934 in Buchten, a village in the Dutch province of Limburg, in a caravan where her Sinti family had stopped for the winter. Her father, Heinrich ‘Moeselman’ Steinbach, worked as a trader and played violin at village fairs. Her mother, Emilia ‘Toetela’ Steinbach, raised the children as the family moved from town to town, a way of life that had already existed in the Netherlands for generations.
The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 didn't immediately target Dutch Sinti and Roma families. That changed in July 1943, when an order banned travelling by wagon and forced Sinti and Roma communities into a small number of guarded assembly camps. The Steinbachs tried to stay ahead of it, but were eventually funnelled, like most others, into the assembly camp at Eindhoven.
The Roundup
On 14 May 1944, Dutch police were ordered to round up Sinti and Roma families across the entire country in a single coordinated operation. Two days later, on 16 May, Settela and her family were among those arrested in Eindhoven. She was taken, along with more than 570 others, directly to Westerbork transit camp, the same holding facility used to process the vast majority of Dutch Jews before their deportation east.
Roughly half of those detained that day were released once officials determined they weren't Romani despite living in caravans. Settela's family wasn't among them.
Westerbork and the Shaved Head
At Westerbork, Settela's head was shaved, officially as a delousing measure but also, as with so much of camp processing, a deliberate act of humiliation. Like the other Sinti and Roma women and girls held there, she covered her bare scalp with a torn strip of cloth. It's that piece of cloth, tied as a makeshift headscarf, that would later make her instantly recognisable and completely anonymous at the same time.
On 19 May 1944, Settela was put on a transport out of Westerbork along with roughly 245 other Sinti and Roma, sharing the train with several hundred Jewish deportees on the same journey. As the wagon doors were being closed, she leaned toward the gap, apparently drawn by a dog or the soldiers outside, and was caught on camera doing it. Her mother pulled her back before the doors shut fully, and the train left for occupied Poland a few minutes later.
Seven Seconds on Film
The camp commandant, Albert Konrad Gemmeker, had ordered a Jewish prisoner named Rudolf Breslauer to film the deportation, part of a longer reel intended to document Westerbork's operations. Breslauer's footage wasn't made as a record for history. It was shot on the orders of the people running the camp, by a prisoner with no real choice in the matter, to present deportation as calm and orderly. Settela's seven seconds of screen time survived that context entirely by accident; nothing about the moment was staged or intended to mean anything beyond the frame.
Breslauer didn't escape what he was filming for long. That September, he and his own family, wife Bella, sons Stefan and Mischa, and daughter Ursula, were deported from Westerbork themselves, first to Theresienstadt and then on to Auschwitz. His wife and two sons were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival; Breslauer himself died a few months later, in early 1945. Only his daughter Ursula survived the war. The man ordered to make deportation look orderly for the camera ended up on exactly the kind of transport he'd filmed.
Auschwitz and the Loss of a Family
On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Settela was held in the camp section the SS designated the “Zigeunerlager”, the Gypsy camp, a separate compound built to hold Sinti and Roma prisoners under conditions even worse than the rest of Birkenau. She's most likely to have died there on the night of 2 to 3 August 1944, when the SS liquidated the entire section in a single night, sending men fit for labour to other camps and sending the women, children and sick straight to the gas chambers. It followed weeks of the SS deliberately reassuring Sinti and Roma prisoners that they were safe, after an earlier attempt to empty the camp in May had been met with open resistance. Some accounts instead give her death as 31 July, a few days earlier; either way, she was nine years old.
She wasn't alone in that loss. Her mother, several of her siblings, an aunt and other relatives were murdered in the same period. Of the Steinbach family's large household, only her father survived the war. He died in the Netherlands in 1946, two years after losing nearly everyone.
A Name Restored
For decades after the war, Breslauer's footage circulated as a symbol of the Dutch Jewish experience of the Holocaust, and the unnamed girl in it became just as famous, and just as misidentified, as the footage itself. That changed because of Dutch journalist Aad Wagenaar, who became fixated on finding out who she really was. Working from the wagon number visible in the frame and cross-referencing transport records, Wagenaar established that the train wasn't a Jewish transport at all, but a mixed convoy carrying Sinti and Roma prisoners alongside Jewish ones. Following months of further searching, a Sinti woman named Crasa Wagner recognised the girl in the footage in the early 1990s and gave Wagenaar her name: Settela Steinbach.
Wagenaar published his findings in a book whose Dutch title translates roughly as Settela: The Girl Gets Her Name Back, and Dutch filmmaker Cherry Duyns documented the search itself in a 1994 film. The discovery didn't just give one child her name and identity back. It forced a public reckoning with how completely the Nazi genocide of Sinti and Roma people, sometimes called the Porajmos, had been overshadowed in Dutch and European Holocaust memory by the time Wagenaar started asking questions.
A Postcard Nobody Could Answer
Perhaps the most quietly devastating document to survive the Steinbach family's story isn't the film footage at all. In May 1945, just after liberation, Settela's father wrote to the Dutch repatriation office from the caravan site where he was living in Eindhoven, asking whether his wife and ten children had been returned from the camps. He didn't yet know that almost none of them were coming back.
An Overlooked Genocide
Historians still don't agree on how many Sinti and Roma people were murdered under Nazi rule. Estimates range from around 220,000 up to as many as 1.5 million, a gap that reflects just how poorly the killings were recorded and how little postwar effort went into counting the dead compared with the meticulous documentation of Jewish victims. A memorial in Berlin dedicated to Sinti and Roma victims wasn't unveiled until 2012, nearly seven decades after the war ended, and nearly two decades after Settela finally got her name back.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Settela Steinbach Jewish?
No. She was Dutch Sinti. She was widely assumed to be Jewish for decades because her image circulated without any identifying information, and the Holocaust in the Netherlands is most commonly associated with the deportation of Dutch Jews.
Who filmed the footage of Settela?
Rudolf Breslauer, a Jewish prisoner at Westerbork, filmed it on the orders of camp commandant Albert Konrad Gemmeker as part of a longer reel documenting the camp's operations.
Did anyone in Settela's family survive?
Only her father survived the war. He died in the Netherlands in 1946.
