- Person
- Anne Frank
- Lived
- 1929–1945
- Field
- Writing
- From
- Dutch-German
The story
From the attic of the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, Anne Frank could see a horse-chestnut tree in the garden behind the building. She mentioned it three times in her diary. On 23 February 1944 she described sitting on the attic floor looking at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree with drops of water shining on its branches, and the gulls gliding overhead, and wrote that as long as such things existed she could not be sad. Her father, Otto, later said he had been surprised to learn how much the tree meant to her, since she had never shown much interest in nature before the war.
The tree, thought to be more than 170 years old, had been weakened by a fungus that rotted its trunk and by leaf-mining moths. In November 2007 the city planned to cut it down, but a court injunction stopped the felling, and neighbours and supporters built a steel structure, finished in May 2008, to hold it up. On 23 August 2010 a storm finally blew it down.
Young trees grown from it carried its story on. A sapling was planted in the Jardin Anne-Frank in Paris in 2007. In the United States, a project led by the Anne Frank Center USA sent saplings to museums, schools, parks and Holocaust remembrance centres; accounts put the number at eleven or thirteen. The first was planted in April 2013 at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
Other American saplings went to places chosen for their meaning: Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the centre of a historic battle over school desegregation; the Clinton Presidential Center, also in Little Rock; and Liberty Park in Manhattan, which honours victims of the September 11 attacks. Further trees grow in California, Idaho, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington, D.C., and Washington state. A horse-chestnut honouring Anne was planted in 2010 in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, a landmark of the civil rights movement.
The tree's descendants have spread well beyond America. Saplings were planted at Batsford Arboretum in Gloucestershire in 2010, in front of the Holocaust Education Center in Fukuyama, Japan, in 2011, and in Lister Park in Bradford in 2015. The Anne Frank House also runs an online Anne Frank Tree, where visitors leave their name on a virtual leaf.
Why it matters
The trees link Anne Frank's story to other struggles against hatred and injustice, giving communities living reminders of the hope she found in a single view from an attic window.
About Anne Frank
Diarist of the Holocaust; her diary has become one of literature's most-read accounts of conscience and hope.
More about Anne Frank
- Anne Frank rewrote her diary to publish it after the warAfter hearing a 1944 radio appeal to preserve wartime diaries, Anne Frank, aged 14, began rewriting her diary as a book, creating pseudonyms and shaping it for readers.
- Anne Frank's diary encouraged Nelson Mandela in prisonNelson Mandela said he read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much encouragement from it" in his struggle against apartheid.
- Anne Frank's birthplace opened a centre for learningIn 1997 the Anne Frank Educational Centre opened in Frankfurt's Dornbusch district, where Anne lived until 1934, as a place to learn about National Socialism and its lessons today.
- Anne Frank's hiding place became a museum in 1960The building where Anne Frank hid was saved from demolition by a foundation formed in 1957 and opened as the Anne Frank House museum on 3 May 1960.
Sources
- Anne Frank Wikipedia
- Anne Frank tree Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.