Decades after the Holocaust, stark memories of a German concentration camp creep back to 83-year-old Dirk van Leenan, who spent the week leading up to Saturday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day educating Arizona students on the atrocity.
“I have nightmares about it sometimes,” van Leenen said about the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where he and his family were sent when he was 5 in an interview with The Arizona Republic , part of the USA TODAY Network.
Saturday marked the 79th anniversary of the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, the concentration camp complex where over 1 million people were murdered by Nazis between 1940 and 1945, the vast majority of them Jews. Altogether, Nazis killed 6 million European Jews during the Holocaust.
Since Jan. 27 was designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005 by the United Nations, the day has drawn survivors and their communities together across the U.S. to remember the lives lost and remind of the importance of combating antisemitism.