Sapling from Anne Frank house Idaho-bound

Posted 11 5 2009 7:34PM

BOISE, Idaho – A human rights memorial in Idaho's capital city will receive a sapling grafted from the chestnut tree that grew outside the secret annex in Amsterdam where Holocaust victim Anne Frank hid from the Nazis.

The 3-foot-tall sapling is to be quarantined at a Boise tree nursery for two years before it's planted at the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, located just south of downtown along the Boise River, according to the Spokesman-Review newspaper.

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Anne Frank Center USA in New York, took applications from dozens of U.S. institutions interested in getting a sapling from the 150-year-old chestnut tree.

In all, 11 U.S. places are getting them, including the White House, the World Trade Center site in New York, and Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., where forced racial integration was carried out in 1957. One sapling also will go to Seattle's Volunteer Park, not far from the location of a fatal 2006 shooting at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

Amy Herzfeld, executive director of the Idaho Human Rights Education Center in Boise, visited the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam in 2007 with a group of Idaho schoolteachers. She says she remembers the big shade tree that Anne Frank mentioned in several entries of her famous diary.

"It was beautiful," Herzfeld told the Spokesman-Review newspaper. "It was very striking."

After her family's hiding place was discovered in 1944, Anne Frank died in a German concentration camp at age 15.

In February 1944, she wrote in her diary, "The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn't speak."

And in May 1944, just three months before she and her family were captured, Frank wrote, "Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year."

Boise's Anne Frank memorial was dedicated in 2002, after thousands of individuals and corporations donated to help build it and schoolchildren across Idaho collected coins to fund a $42,000 life-size bronze sculpture of Anne. She's depicted peering through an attic window in the hidden annex where she and relatives sought shelter during World War II.