Sapling from Anne Frank’s Tree Cut Down in Amsterdam
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A sapling that came from the tree that stood outside the hiding place of Anne Frank in Amsterdam was cut down and stolen in Frankfurt, German police said.
The cutting was planted in 2008 outside Frankfurt’s Anne Frank School, named after the world-famous Jewish teenage diarist who was born in the German city in 1929 and murdered during the Holocaust in 1945 after her family was caught hiding in the Nazi-occupied Dutch capital, where they had moved to escape persecution in Germany.
Unidentified parties cut down the 8-foot tree that grew from the cutting sometime between last week and Monday, according to a report Tuesday by the Dutch public broadcaster NOS. Police have no information or leads on the identity of the thieves or their motives, the report said.
“It was, obviously, more than just a tree for us,” a spokesperson for Frankfurt’s Anne Frank School told NOS. “We grew it with the help of a landscape architect and with the loving care of several classes.”
The tree is not easily replaceable, as the original chestnut tree which stood outside Anne Frank’s hiding place, and which features in her diary, was cut down in 2010 following a storm.
Several cuttings from that tree are found around the world. The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel in The Hague, or CIDI, is in possession of a 13-foot tree that grew from a certified cutting of the original trunk.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
