Anne Frank's dying tree

last updated 8 January 2015

Amsterdam

The chestnut tree that Anne Frank would gaze at as she hid from the Nazis is dying of a fungus and must be cut down, Amsterdam authorities said this week. Frank, a Dutch Jewish girl whose diary chronicled her family's ordeal during the Nazi occupation, described the tree as the only bit of nature she could see from an attic window while she hid in her father's office building. Officials at the Anne Frank museum, which is located in that building, said they've taken grafts from the tree and will plant a sapling in the same location. The Frank family was betrayed in 1944, and Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp the following year.