Congress plants ‘Anne Frank’ sapling at US Capitol

WASHINGTON — For Holocaust diarist Anne Frank, who hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic, hope came in the form of a white horse chestnut tree growing outside her window.

Now a 3-foot sapling grown from that same tree graces the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol, a symbol, lawmakers said, of the young girl’s abiding faith in humanity. The Jewish teenager wrote about the tree and the joy she took from it three times in her diary, which is perhaps the world’s best-known piece of Holocaust literature.

“May this tree grow to its full height, serene and bursting with life, planted in our nation’s capital,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., at an April 30 ceremony.

In 2010, weakened by disease, the original tree fell in a windstorm. But the Anne Frank House, which preserves her family’s hideout as a museum, had harvested chestnuts from the tree and sprouted them into saplings, offshoots of Frank’s tree to be planted around the world. The sapling on the Capitol’s West Lawn was the sixth to be planted.