When Dirk Van Leenen sits down to speak in Mayer this October, he will be doing what he has done for years now: telling a room full of strangers what it was like to be a small child in a place where human beings were stacked like cordwood. He was born in 1940 in the Netherlands, just after the war had begun, and before he was old enough to understand what was happening, he and his parents were sent to Bergen-Belsen, the German concentration camp where Anne Frank died of typhus in 1945.
His family's arrival at Bergen-Belsen came at the very end of the war. The camp was liberated by the British Army on April 15, 1945, and by Van Leenen's own account the family was there only a short time — in some tellings, a single day; in others, ten hours — before the soldiers arrived. A British officer recognized his father as a member of the Dutch resistance and secured the family's quick release. Van Leenen has described the scene in blunt, unadorned terms: "It was huge chaos with dead bodies on mountains of dead bodies." He has also said that the memories still follow him into sleep. "I have nightmares about it sometimes," he told The Arizona Republic.
What makes his story unusual is not only that he survived, but how his family survived before the train ever came. His father, Cornelius, was part of the Dutch resistance, and the family home became a way station in a quiet, extraordinarily dangerous operation. According to accounts of his talks, Van Leenen's father is credited with saving more than a thousand Jews, who were relocated to different parts of the country and placed in hiding. His father is credited with showing "resistance on a bicycle" — the image that gives Van Leenen's first book its title — carrying messages and people across a country under occupation. His mother, Johanna Schmall, was Jewish, and she survived the war in part because of a clerical misspelling of her last name that kept her from being identified for nearly the entirety of the Holocaust.
Van Leenen has spent much of the last two decades turning that history into books. He is the author of a trilogy on the Dutch resistance: "Resistance on a Bicycle," published in 2007; "The Americans are Coming!!!," which followed in 2010; and "The Last Train to the Concentration Camp." The books are not abstract history. They are the record of a family that chose to hide strangers at the risk of its own life, written by the child who was in the house while it happened.
His life after the war took a turn that seems almost designed to contrast with its beginning. Van Leenen spent his working life in flowers. He came to Arizona in 1989 for what was supposed to be a single year, to set up a flower processing plant as a horticulturist, and decided to stay after meeting his wife, Cindy. The couple married shortly afterward. He is a father of four children from a previous marriage in Holland, and with Cindy he has seven children, seventeen grandchildren, and, by more recent counts, eighteen great-grandchildren. He lives in Mesa.
For years he has been a fixture in Arizona classrooms and auditoriums, speaking to middle school and high school students about the Holocaust and about antisemitism. One such appearance, following a Childsplay Theatre production of "The Diary of Anne Frank" at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, drew more than 700 Phoenix-area middle schoolers. He has also appeared at the Arizona Jewish Historical Society, which describes his testimony as a video seminar in which he recounts both his own survival and his father's work on the bicycle. In Denver, he once met another Bergen-Belsen survivor, Sarah Moses, for the first time — a meeting arranged by a student of World War II history who had heard Van Leenen lecture and then read about Moses in a newspaper. Moses had spent nearly a year in the camp; Van Leenen had been there only hours. "The British came in and ran and chased the guards and the military," he recalled. "And sometimes, they overran the prisoners who were walking around."
That is the kind of firsthand detail that cannot be reconstructed once the people who lived it are gone, and it is the reason the Mayer Public Library's program has been moved. The event was originally scheduled for the library itself, but the number of junior high and high school students planning to attend, combined with the library's limited space, pushed it across the street to the Mayer Recreation Center. The program runs from 10 to 11 a.m. on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, and Van Leenen's presentation lasts approximately one hour. It is a free library program, open to the public.
The Mayer Recreation Center sits at 10001 S. Wicks Ave., across from the library at 10004 Wicks Ave. in Mayer, a small community in Yavapai County roughly an hour north of Phoenix. For a town that size, an hour of living testimony from a man who was in Bergen-Belsen as a child is an unusual thing to have on the calendar — and the fact that local students are the reason the venue had to grow is, in its own way, part of the story Van Leenen has spent his later life telling.