More than 700 Phoenix-area middle school children sat quietly Thursday morning in the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts’ auditorium. On stage, lamps overhead shone on Dirk van Leenen as he sat at an upholstered chair and recounted surviving a Nazi concentration camp.
The 83-year-old Mesa resident was the featured speaker following a performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Diary of Anne Frank” by Tempe’s Childsplay Theater, Inc. As a Dutch boy, van Leenen and his parents were sent in 1945 to Bergen-Belsen — the same German concentration camp where a 16-year-old Frank died of typhus earlier that same year.
All these decades later, stark memories of the German death camp creep back to van Leenen in his sleep.
“I have nightmares about it sometimes,” van Leenen said about the concentration camp in an interview with The Arizona Republic.
This was the fourth appearance before students this week as Saturday marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Van Leenen’s appearance before school children was part of a broader effort to inform Arizona’s youth about the dangers of antisemitism.