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Holocaust survivor’s past enthralls QC students
BY MARK MORAN Tribune Staff Writer
Dirk Van Leenan was two when soldiers showed up at his tiny house in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1942.
“I thought those soldiers were magnificent,” Van Leenan said. “I looked up to them. I thought, ‘Beautiful! Uniforms and a gun!’ That’s exciting for a little boy.”
Dirk instantly thought of the 20 Jews hiding under the clapboard porch of the house and reacted with the same sense of innocence and excitement that any 2-yearold boy might,
“I thought they were doing a game of hide and seek,” Van Leenan recalled on Sept. 23 for a group Queen Creek Junior High students at an assembly at Crismon High School.
“They were searching the house and I thought ‘you know, I know where the people are so I can help them a little bit.’ And my mother saw that I was going to do that.”
Van Leenan’s mother – the wife of the prominent Nazi resistance movement leader Cornelius Van Leenan - quickly intervened.
“She grabbed me and took me to another room and said ‘never tell the soldiers where our friends are,’” Van Leenan, now 82, said. “Because they’re going to take them. So, I learned at an early age that the Jewish people were hunted down by the Nazis and taken away to concentration camps.”
Van Leenan tells his moving and personal story across the Valley every chance he gets feeling it’s important to keep the message alive lest it be forgotten.
The students were held rapt by his stories of suffering and perseverance.
“I could never imagine in a million years,” said seventh-grader Jaxson Bales. “I would be so scared. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
Many of the students lined up after Van Leenan’s half hour speech to hug him, thank him or to simply shake his hand. Dirk Van Leenan, a Holocaust survivor, told his chilling tale of life under the Nazis to a group of enrapt Queen Creek Junior High students
during an assembly Sept. 23. (David Minton/Tribune Staff Photographer)
“I’ve heard people talk about it,” said Jaxson. “I’ve never really talked about it with anyone in my other classes. I thought it was really interesting.”
Among Van Leenan’s earliest memories is a family of four fellow Jews who lived on his street in The Hague.
He was fond of the two little girls who were close to his age and they were playmates until a truck showed up one day and Dirk watched as those armed soldiers he once revered pushed their parents into the back of the truck.
“And then my two girlfriends came out crying,” Van Leenan said. “The soldiers grabbed them by the arm and threw them on the truck like a sack of potatoes. They were put on a train to a concentration camp and finally killed. That’s nasty.”
Van Leenan said the alliances that neighbors built to protect each other and other members of the resistance wore thin when the Nazis began using tactics to turn people against each other.
As the German occupation wore on, it became more difficult to tell who was part of the resistance and pretenders.
“There is another group of people and those are the people that collaborate with the enemy,” he said. “They call them traitors and in Holland there were a lot of traitors. And the reason was because there was no food.
“Can you imagine having nothing to eat for three days, let alone two weeks?” Van Leenan said.
There was no food because the Germans had taken it from nearby farms and factories and sent it to fuel soldiers.
Van Leenan says he and his family survived on boiled sugar beets and the cardboard-like patties and syrup they produced just to have something to chew on. Desperate for anything to eat, neighbors and friends started to turn in other members of the resistance in exchange for food.
Dirk’s father was eventually captured by Nazi soldiers while hiding in a bin of cattle manure. His father was taken to a city jail and tortured for five days. Soldiers then came for the family, and loaded them onto a train with at least 200 other people.
“It was so tight that I was standing there and I could not even move my hands,” Van Leenan said. “It took four days and four nights of standing in that cattle car together with people. No toilet. No water. No food. Not enough oxygen because of so many people. And when we arrived, we arrived in a camp called Bergen-Belsen.”
At the time, Bergen-Belsen was the last concentration camp still open and held at least 60,000 captured Jews.
“And everywhere we saw mountains of dead bodies,” Van Leenan said. “The faces I will never forget. Sometimes I wake up at night and see those faces.”
The family miraculously survived the conditions in Bergen-Belsen and was eventually liberated in April 1945. Queen Creek Junior High students were moved by Dirk Van Leenan’s stories about the Nazi occupation and his internment in a German concentration camp where thousands of Jews
died. (David Minton/Tribune Staff Photographer)
According to the Wiener Holocaust Library website, “In the immediate aftermath of the liberation, over 500 people died each day as a result of the extremely poor sanitation and widespread disease… In total, over 50,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen throughout its existence.”
The Queen Creek School District has made a conscious effort to invite Van Leenan and other people who have
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been part of significant historical events to tell their first-hand stories in person to students.
“I don’t want these stories in classrooms to just be that – to be stories,” said Fern Otero, Queen Creek School District’s instructional coach for social studies, adding:
“It happened. It was real and I feel like the more that we can expose our students to the reality of it, it becomes less of a story and more of actual events that we need to be aware of.”
Otero worked with the Phoenix Holocaust Association to find Van Leenan and set up his presentation to the students. The association has as its mission to “promote awareness of the Holocaust and continue to repair the world.”
Van Leenan has authored three books about surviving life as a Jew in the 1940s and his time in the concentration camp.
“I am one of the few people that is still alive. Most Holocaust survivors are no more,” Van Leenan said. “There are tragic things, but there are also very uplifting things of people helping people.”
Know anything interesting going on in Queen Creek? Send your news to pmaryniak@timeslocalmedia.com
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