New life for Anne Frank’s tree

By David W. Dunlap

She would have been 79 this year, turning 80. Had she survived, Frank would still be able to see the horse chestnut tree by which she measured the seasons of life during her two years of hiding from the Nazis, not just behind the building in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from which she and her family were taken by the Gestapo in 1944 but — if the plans of the Anne Frank Centre USA are realized — at 10 sites around the country, including New York City.

Ten saplings that originated from that stately but ailing tree are to be brought here later this year for distribution by the centre, a non-profit organisation.

Yvonne Simons, the executive director of the centre, is hoping to raise the organisation’s low profile. Until recently, the 32-year-old centre — which is affiliated with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam — concerned itself largely with coordinating travelling exhibits based on Frank’s life and diary.

Now, through art and writing programmes in schools and prisons, it is also focusing more generally on the theme of tolerance. The 10 horse chestnut saplings, each about three feet high, are intended as a living expression of that mission.

"What we really hope to do is plant them in areas across the U.S. as a symbol of the growth of tolerance," said Ms. Simons. She said she would like to see one planted around the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center, another near the White House.

The Anne Frank Tree, as it is called, has had a troubled recent history, under such attack by fungi and moths that the city of Amsterdam decided in 2007 that it would have to be felled before it could fall on its own accord. An international protest followed. Now the ailing tree is braced by a structural support and is expected to remain standing for up to 15 years.

Frank would have last glimpsed the tree in August 1944, before she and the other Jewish occupants of a secret annex in a warehouse and office building in Amsterdam were rounded up by the Gestapo.

At the age of 15, she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Though Frank referred to the tree sparingly in her diary, it is clear how important it was to her as evidence of so much that she could not experience.

"From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind," she wrote on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 1944.

"When I looked outside right into the depth of nature and God," she added, a few paragraphs later, "then I was happy, really happy."