A tree is dying in Amsterdam.
It’s the horse chestnut that Anne Frank could see out her window while she lived in hiding.
“Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year,” she wrote in May 1944, months before she and her family were dragged from their secret annex.
Turns out the 150-year-old tree is under attack from fungi and moths. The center working to preserve her legacy aims to extend its life — at least symbolically — by planting 10 saplings in places that “memorialize incidents of intolerance and discrimination” in the United States.
Of more than 100 applications submitted, none that organizers know of come from Colorado.
Not that we don’t have spots meeting the criteria. Two come immediately to mind, both known in connection with the word “massacre.”
At Sand Creek in 1864, the Colorado Territory militia raided an Indian village and murdered hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members.
And at Ludlow in 1914, the Colorado National Guard attacked a camp of striking miners, killing at least 18 people, 11 of them children.
Both sites warrant a sapling.
As does the scrubby patch of prairie near Grenada where the federal government locked up Japanese Americans during World War II.
Or the land behind Denver’s Union Station where two homeless men were found decapitated, part of a rash of such killings downtown in 1999.
Or the Auraria site of the former St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church where, during a Mass in 1908, Father Leo Heinrichs placed a sacrament on the tongue of anarchist Giuseppe Guarnacoto who then shot the priest in the heart.
There is a field outside Laramie that deserves a sapling. That’s where a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, was left for dead on a fence post after having been beaten so hard his skull was fractured in six places. The cyclist who found him thought he was a scarecrow.
And there is a block in Aurora that also could use some shade. It’s where immigrants sit in the sun waiting for work to feed their families. Police often shoo them from the sidewalks and ticket them for trespassing.
While I’m at it, I might as well throw in the lot in Littleton that’s home to homegrown xenophobe Tom Tancredo. You know, the nation’s best-known immigration critic who happened to use a crew of undocumented workers to remodel his basement.
And it’s worth considering the housing tract named after the Denver mayor who pledged his loyalty to the Ku Klux Klan. Stapleton, which was transformed from the city’s treeless airport, could use all the landscaping it can get.
As it happens, tree experts say the soil of the Rocky Mountain West is especially amenable to exactly the type of tree that Anne Frank gazed at from hiding.
In a 1968 speech, her father, Otto, recounted not having known “how important the chestnut tree was to her” until reading her diary. “She longed for it during that time when she felt like a caged bird,” he said. “But she had kept such feelings completely to herself.”
The Anne Frank Center USA is accepting applications for saplings that it will plant this fall.
“We’re looking for places that need reminders about tolerance,” said director Yvonne Simons.
That means places where kids might have played, promises could have been met and people like Anne Frank, who would have turned 80 this month, should have been let to live.
Denver Post researcher Barry Osborne contributed to this piece.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it incorrectly described Auraria as the site of the former St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church. The church has been at the same site since 1878.
