Anna Maria (Settela) Steinbach (December 23, 1934, Buchten, Netherlands - between July 31 and August 3, 1944, Auschwitz death camp ) is a gypsy girl from the Netherlands who died with her family in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz . Her photo, which is a shot from documentary footage taken during the loading of prisoners on a train to Auschwitz , was for a long time one of the symbols of the Holocaust in the Netherlands , until in 1994 journalist Ad Wagenar ( Dutch Aad Wagenaar ) identified the girl and her affiliation Gypsy Sinti . Now the photograph is a symbol of the genocide of European gypsies .
| Steinbach, Settela | |
|---|---|
| Steinbach, Settela | |
 | |
| Birth name | Steinbach, Anna Maria (Settela) |
| Date of Birth | December 23, 1934 |
| Place of Birth | Buchten ( Sittard-Gehlen Community, Limburg Province) |
| Date of death | between July 31 and August 3, 1944 |
| Place of death | Auschwitz death camp |
| Nationality | Netherlands |
| Father | Steinbach, Heinrich |
| Mother | Steinbach, Emilia |
Biography
Anna-Maria (gypsy name - Settela) Steinbach was born in the village of Buchten of the Sittard-Gelen community in the province of Limburg , the Netherlands . Settela was the seventh child in the family of the merchant and violinist Heinrich (Muselmann) and Emilia (Tutela) Steinbach, who had ten children.
On May 16, 1944, she was arrested in Eindhoven during a raid on gypsies organized throughout the country. On the same day, along with the other 577 arrested, she was deported to the Westerbork transit camp . 279 people were released because, according to racial criteria, the Nazis were not considered gypsies, despite the fact that they lived like gypsies in residential vans.
On May 19, 1944, 244 Roma, including Settela, were sent by train to the concentration camp and the Auschwitz death camp (Auschwitz-Birkenau ). In Westerbork, the prisoner of the transit camp Jew Rudolf Breslauer ( German Rudolf Breslauer ), on the orders of the German camp commandant Albert Konrad Gemmeker ( German Albert Konrad Gemmeker ), filmed the sending of the train with the deportees, and among others, Settela was shot. According to eyewitness Krasa Wagner, who was in the same freight car, Settela's mother shouted a girl by name and told her to move away from the door so that her head would not be pinched, as one could already hear the door shutters being closed and locked outside. In a short fragment of the documentary, Settela looks out the ajar door of a freight car. Perhaps she is looking at a dog running near the train. The girl’s head is tied with a piece of cloth, possibly a torn pillowcase — all gypsies shaved their heads to prevent pediculosis before being sent, and, according to Wagner, they had to cover their heads with anything [1] .
On May 21, the train arrived in Auschwitz . The deported gypsies were registered and placed in the so-called. "Gypsy family camp." Those who were recognized as able-bodied were forced to work at the factories of the "I. G. Farbenindustrii " , as well as in external teams with the goal of" destruction through labor. " The remaining 3,000 Gypsy prisoners were killed by gas during the period from July to August 3, 1944. Among them were Settela Steinbach, her mother, two brothers, two sisters, aunt, two nephews and a niece. Of the entire Settela family, only his father survived. He died of grief in 1946 and is buried in Maastricht .
After the war, a seven-second fragment of the Rudolf Breslauer film was used countless times in documentaries. The image of the unknown "girl in a headscarf" looking scared out of the train car heading to Auschwitz became a symbol of the victims of the Nazi mass crimes. The erroneous identification of the doomed girl as a Jew occurred due to the fact that little attention was paid to the topic of the Gypsy genocide for a long time.
In December 1992, the Dutch journalist Ad Wagenar became interested in the girl’s personality. For some details of the appearance of the wagons - first of all, according to the numbers written with chalk on board - as well as finding out the identity of the only suitcase that fell into the frame, Wagenar set the date for sending the captured train - May 19, 1944. According to the documents, it was a mixed train on which the Dutch Jews and gypsies were deported. On February 7, 1994, Krasa Wagner, who had survived at Auschwitz and lived in the parking lot of the “van residents” in Speikeniss , identified Settela from the photograph Wagenar had shown her. " Van residents" ( Dutch: woonwagenbewoners ) is a marginal social group in the Netherlands (derogatoryly called "kampers"; preferred self-name is "reizigers", "traveling"), formed in the 19th century from representatives of the impoverished layers of the Dutch population and speaking in the sociolect "barguns "( Dutch. Bargoens ), a variety of Dutch jargon.
The story of how the girl from the infamous photo was identified was told in the documentary Settela, gezicht van het verleden (Settela, a person from the past) (director Cherry Duyns , 1994). The results of his journalistic investigation, Wagenar published in a book.
Notes
- ↑ WWII: Never Again! (inaccessible link) . artists-for-roma-net.ning.com. Date of treatment May 21, 2016. Archived on August 15, 2016.
Links
- Aad Wagenaar: Settela, het meisje heeft haar naam terug ("Settela: the girl whose name was returned"). ISBN 90-295-5612-9 .
- Aad Wagenaar: Settela (English translation, 2005). ISBN 0-907123-70-8 .