Anne's tree falls

The 150-year old chestnut tree immortalised in the diary of the Jewish teenager Anne Franks has collapsed after a heavy storm. In a diary entry in February 1944, Frank described how she would go to the attic each morning and "look up at the blue sky the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shin, appearing like silver". "As long as this exists," she wrote, "I may live to see it. While this lasts I cannot be unhappy."
Frank died, aged 15, in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp the following year.
In 2007 an international campaign was launched to attempt to preserve the tree, which had become diseased.
Sunday Times, 29. August 2010