Dutch campaigners in last bid to save Anne Frank tree
AMSTERDAM (AFP) — Campaigners fighting to save a diseased tree in Amsterdam that was fondly described by Anne Frank in her diary about life in hiding under Nazi occupation made a last bid Thursday to stop it being felled.
The Dutch Tree Foundation and residents of the neighbourhood where the huge horse chestnut stands lodged a final appeal to municipal authorities not to cut it down as planned on Wednesday.
They contest the authorities' claim that 72 percent of the tree is diseased, and therefore could blow over at any time. The tree's owner wants it destroyed because under Dutch law he is liable to any damage done if this occurs.
Although a licence to fell the tree has already been granted, the authorities had given campaigners until January to come up with a rescue plan. On Tuesday they said a new assessment of the tree required urgent action.
The tree, estimated to be more than 150 years old, sits in the garden of a canal house on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht. It is overlooked by the annex the Frank family hid in, which has been turned into a museum.
Anne Frank wrote in her diary on February 23, 1944: "We both looked up to the blue sky, the horse chestnut whose bare branches glittered with droplets, the gulls and the other birds that seemed made of silver as they swooped by.
"All of this moved us so much that we could not speak."
Amsterdam authorities plan to plant a tree genetically identical to the diseased chestnut in its place.
Meanwhile, figures released by the Centre Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) Thursday suggest anti-Semitism remains a problem in the Netherlands.
There were 261 cases of anti-Semitism here last year, up 64 percent from 159 in 2005, although the number of violent incidents fell.
The CIDI attributed the increase to the high number of anti-Semitic emails sent in July and August 2006 during the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
