Anne Frank's Beloved Chestnut Tree Felled By Storm

(Aug. 23) -- The giant chestnut tree that breathed life into Anne Frank's lonely hiding place in her Amsterdam attic has toppled over in a storm.

The trunk of the 150-year-old tree snapped a few feet from the ground today, missing the Anne Frank House museum but smashing into gardens and sheds. No one was injured.

"Someone yelled, 'It's falling. The tree is falling,' and then you heard it go down," museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostart told The Associated Press. "Luckily no one was hurt."

Evert Elzinga, AP

The splintered trunk of a monumental chestnut tree, which comforted Anne Frank while she hid from the Nazis during World War II, is seen after falling over on Monday in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The tree's trunk snapped close to the ground, and it toppled into neighboring gardens.

Evert Elzinga / AP

In this April 7, 2008, file photo, cranes carrying workers stretch toward the chestnut tree, which was in the courtyard behind the Anne Frank House museum. The 27-ton tree was encased in a steel tripod as a precaution against falling.

The Jewish teenager described the tree as a source of comfort and beauty in the diary she kept as she hid from the Nazis during World War II.

"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," she wrote in May 1944, when she was 14.

Three months later, Frank was betrayed and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died of typhus. Her diary, published years after her death, is one of the most celebrated first-hand accounts of the Holocaust.

The tree was rotting in 2007 and being attacked by moths when officials in Amsterdam said it was a safety hazard and planned to chop it down. But after a worldwide campaign was launched to save the tree, the chestnut's trunk was enforced with steel instead.

However, today's storms proved too much for the tree, which is now in pieces in the yard outside the museum. Arnold Heertje of the Support Anne Frank Tree group said it was time to accept that nature had run its course.

"You have to bow your head to the facts. The tree has fallen and will be cut into pieces and disappear. The intention was not to keep this tree alive forever. It has lived for 150 years, and now it's over and we're not going to extend it," he told Reuters.

But earlier this year, saplings from the chestnut were sent to different locations around in the world, including the United States, according to The Jewish Weekly.

So perhaps a descendant will bloom again, just as lovely as Frank described her tree in another diary entry. "Our chestnut tree is in full blossom," she wrote. "It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year."

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