Judge Spares Anne Frank's Tree

Nov. 22, 2007 — -- After an intense, months-long battle with city officials, community activists in the Netherlands have won a reprieve from a city plan to tear down Anne Frank's famous chestnut tree, at least temporarily.

A Dutch judge decided Tuesday that the monumental tree Frank wrote about in her world-famous diary is healthy enough to remain standing and does not have to be felled, at least not immediately.

The 27-ton tree suffers from fungal disease and was scheduled to be cut down Wednesday.

"We are so happy about this," said Helga Fassbinder, a neighbor who looks down on the tree from her apartment in Amsterdam, and founder of the Committee to Save Anne Frank's Tree.

"That tree is not just a tree," Fassbinder said. "It is one of the last living witnesses to Anne Frank and all that took place here."

Frank went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1942 to escape Nazi persecution. She could see the tree from the only window that was not blacked out in the cramped apartment she shared for more than two years with her family and several others, and she wrote about it in her diary.

By the tree's changing leaves, she could tell the turning seasons.

"Our chestnut tree is in full blossom," a 14-year-old Frank wrote May 13, 1944, less than three months before she and her family were betrayed by an unknown source and arrested. "It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year."

In March 1945, the Jewish teenager died in the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Her diary was published after the war and sold millions of copies.

"The significance of the tree in the diary is that the tree stood for the outside world, the normal world before the war," Rolf Wolfswinkel, a professor of history at New York University and the academic adviser to the Anne Frank Center of New York, told ABC News.

"In a kind of transcendental way," Wolfswinkel added, "the tree became a symbol of freedom for her."

In recent months, "Anne's tree," as it is known in the Netherlands, had become the focus of a growing international controversy.