It wasn’t until after he read his daughter Anne’s diary that Otto Frank discovered how deeply she was moved by nature. Miep Gies, who just passed away at 101, discovered Anne’s immortalized journal and papers just as the Nazis besieged the Amsterdam house where the Frank family had been hiding. Gies, who stowed the Frank family safely away for 2 years, preserved the young girl’s writings and gave them to Otto following the end of the war (he was the family’s sole survivor).
Anne would gaze out the window from her hiding place (the Secret Annex) in the attic and draw hope and inspiration from the small slice of blue sky she would be able to see, and from the chestnut tree framed by the only opening to the outside world. She wrote in her diary:
“Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite 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. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”
Recently, the tree itself, a 150-year-old horse chestnut, succumbed to pests and fungus. But it is being given new life through the successful nurturing of saplings taken from the original tree, that are slated for planting in locations around the world where these new trees will serve as symbols of hope and remembrance.
As The San Francisco Chronicle has reported, saplings have been cultivated from Anne’s beloved tree, and the first of 11 intended for planting in the United States has arrived at California’s Sonoma State University. Other U.S. sites chosen as plating sites include The White House, the William J. Clinton Foundation in Little Rock, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Sonoma State, the only planting site in California, was chosen in recognition of its decades of dedication to teachings about the Holocaust.
Photo courtesy of Ellywa via Wikimedia Commons
