Anne Frank's tree lives on

The diseased chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she hid from the Nazis during the Second World War has been granted a reprieve.

The 150-year-old tree was due to be chopped down after experts said it was terminally rotten.

The tree is familiar to millions of readers of 'The Diary of Anne Frank'.

It stands behind the “secret annex” on top of the canal-side warehouse where the Jewish teenager and her family hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and its crown was just visible through the attic skylight – the only window that was not blacked out.

An appeals panel has made two separate decisions: one upholding the right of the tree’s owner to have it cut down any time in the next two years, and another granting a request by the country’s Trees Institute to investigate the possibility of saving it.

The tree is on land next to the building that is now the Anne Frank Museum.

The Utrecht-based Trees Institute said its salvage plan would likely involve a combination of treatments and supports for the trunk and limbs.

“Safety must come first,” said a spokesman. “It’s dangerous for people, and you don’t even want to think about what could happen if it were to fall into the Anne Frank house.”

Anne made several references to the tree in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until the family was arrested in August 1944.

“Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs,” she wrote on February 23, 1944. “From my favourite 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. …

“As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”

She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.

In May 2005, much of the tree’s crown was trimmed in an effort to stabilise it, but in November 2006, the city council ruled it was a hazard. In March, the council granted a license to have it cut down – prompting protests by the Tree Institute and others.