By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — When the Anne Frank Center USA opens its brand-new headquarters near the World Trade Center this fall, one of its most moving artifacts will be stuck in a government quarantine hundreds of miles away.
That artifact is a sapling, a descendant of the Amsterdam chestnut tree that the young Frank observed while she was in hiding and mentioned in her diary as bringing her comfort.
The sapling is supposed to put down roots on the 9/11 memorial plaza, one block from the Anne Frank Center's new home — but it cannot arrive until it finishes its three-year Department of Agriculture quarantine in Maryland in November 2012, said Yvonne Simons, executive director of the center.
"It was kind of a disappointment," Simons said of the delay, which is to ensure the foreign flora does not contaminate native species. "It's such a special tree."
The sapling is one of 11 that the Amsterdam Anne Frank Museum propagated from the original 170-year-old tree before it snapped and crashed to the ground last August. Nine of the other saplings will eventually go to other sites around America that advocate for tolerance once they complete their quarantine. The final sapling is already growing in Montreal at Federation CJA, a Jewish community group.
Frank mentioned the tree in her diary several times during her two years in hiding, before she and her family were discovered by Nazis and sent to concentration camps. Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, at the age of 15.
"Our chestnut tree is in full bloom," Frank wrote on May 13, 1944. "It's covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year."
Although the chestnut sapling will take longer to arrive in lower Manhattan than Simons had hoped, she is still pleased to finally have a deal for new space for the museum nearby. After a long search for a new home, the Anne Frank Center just signed a 10-year lease for 2,500 square feet on the ground floor of 100 Church St.
Simons hopes to open the new space to visitors at the beginning of September, to tie in with the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
"It's particularly poignant that we're so close," Simons said of the center's location near the 9/11 memorial.
The museum will tell Frank's story along with the broader story of the Nazis and World War II and will also get visitors thinking about examples of intolerance today, Simons said. She said the museum's location near the Park51 Islamic community center, which is around the corner, was purely a coincidence.
The museum's centerpiece will be a room covered in projected photos of the Frank family's small hiding place, which will envelop visitors and be the closest possible thing to visiting the real Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
"You feel like you're in the room," Simons said. "It's very moving and very compelling."
The Anne Frank Center is currently housed on the fifth floor of a SoHo co-op building, where very few people walk in off the street, but Simons hopes that the new location will offer more visibility and draw more visitors.
The new Church Street space will also have more room for public programs, including lectures and film and theater series, Simons said.
