Anne Frank's Beloved Tree Falls

A tree beloved by Anne Frank is gone, toppled by a storm today in Amsterdam. The chestnut tree stood outside the window of the attic where Frank hid, and she often wrote about it in her diaries. In the years since her death, the 150-year-old “Anne Frank Tree” became rotted and diseased; city officials ordered it felled, but a 2007 campaign managed to save it. Its trunk was encased in a steep support system, but even that failed to protect it from today’s strong winds, the AP reports.

No one was hurt, and the nearby Anne Frank House museum was unharmed. The tree lives on through more than 160 clones planted in Amsterdam and the US. “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,” Frank wrote in 1944. Pieces of the tree are now for sale on a Dutch auction site, Reuters adds.
(More Anne Frank stories.)