Anne Frank Tree Lives On At Sonoma State University

It was one of the most celebrated trees in the world. This week it was blown over by strong winds.

The diseased chestnut tree was the one that Anne Frank looked at from her window while she was hiding from the Nazis during World War Two in Amsterdam. But it turns out eleven saplings were taken from the tree as a way to give it life after succumbing to disease and the elements.

The famed tree will live on in the saplings that have been brought to the United States for planting. One of the saplings has ended up here in the Bay Area.

At first, Sonoma State University might seem an unlikely place to get one of the prized eleven cuttings from Jewish teenager Anne Frank's tree, but it did. In fact, the school was the first to get one.

The bare root cutting, barely a foot tall, arrived in a cardboard tube in December. Now the head of landscaping says the chestnut tree has grown half a foot and is thriving.

"I'm always checking it out. Even when I got away on vacation, I actually do think about it," said director of Sonoma State landscaping Sam Youney.

He has time to think about it. The tree will be in quarantine for three years to make sure it doesn't have any of the three diseases that infected the mother tree in Amsterdam.

Officials here think the school was selected for one of the prized cuttings because of the Holocaust and Genocide Memorial on campus and 30 years of teaching about such atrocities.

The sapling has a deeply personal significance for Social Sciences Dean Elaine Leeder. Her father's family and part of her mother's family died in the Holocaust. Just as Jewish teenager Frank and her mother and sister died in a concentration camp.

"Even the fact that the tree fell down and we have already received a cutting from it indicates to me ... In Yiddish we have a phrase. It's called 'beshert.' It's supposed to be," said Leeder.

In the two years Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis, she wrote in her diary that the growth of the chestnut tree gave her hope for the future.

"If we don't learn from our past then we are doomed to repeat it. And we are repeating it," said Leeder.

And now that tree will grow as tall as 80 feet in the memorial and teach many generations.