How Anne Frank Is Linked to a Sapling on Staten Island

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll find out how a cutting of a tree that Anne Frank saw while in hiding during World War II ended up on a college campus on Staten Island. We’ll also get details on former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was hospitalized with pneumonia in Florida.

From the window in her family’s hiding place in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank could see a chestnut tree in a courtyard garden nearby. One day, she wrote in her diary that raindrops shone on the branches, “appearing like silver.” On another day, she noted that the tree was “thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year.”

In 2011, the tree — by then diseased and rotting — was knocked down in a storm. But cuttings have given rise to saplings. One has just been planted at Wagner College on Staten Island.

The view could not be more different. Lori Weintrob, a professor at Wagner, called the college’s 105-acre campus “an idyllic space up on a hill” with a view of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. She said the idea of a bridge was appropriate for the Wagner College Holocaust Center, of which she is the founding director. The center, she said, works to build bridges between the campus and the community and encourages dialogue among Jews, Muslims, Christians and Hindus.

“Staten Island, like New York City, is a melting pot,” Weintrob said, “so this is a great place to create these relationships, to inspire students by showing how you can connect people of different faiths.”

But the campus is also a place to teach Anne’s story — and the story of the people in her life who were “upstanders,” as Weintrob called those who did the right thing under extreme pressure.

Weintrob said the tree “symbolized the freedom she was longing for and that, if she hadn’t been deported to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, that she might have been able to attain.” And she mentioned Miep Gies, the secretary who helped Anne while she was in hiding — and preserved her diary.

“Sometimes Anne Frank’s story is interpreted more as being hopeful, but we have to put it in the context that she doesn’t survive, that there’s the reality of that and that the Jewish community in the Netherlands was obliterated by the Holocaust,” Weintrob said. “So the emphasis is that even though these people who resisted or did extraordinary deeds are the exceptions, they are the role models.”

Weintrob said that Leo Ullman — who, like Anne, spent time in hiding in Amsterdam during World War II — and his wife, Katherine, approached Wagner last year about donating a tree for the campus. “The significance to me is to keep the story of the Holocaust in people’s minds,” he said. “I believe that the tree is relatable.” He also mentioned Weintrob’s work and that of her colleague at the center, Laura Morowitz.

Ullman is a former chairman of the Anne Frank Center USA, which had made plans in the early 2000s to import 10 saplings from the tree in Amsterdam, then more than 150 years old and weakened by a fungal infection. Municipal officials in Amsterdam had decided that it needed to come down; the backlash that followed prompted them to brace the tree with a structural support, but it was no match for the storm in 2011.

The Wagner seedling’s path wound through the Midwest. One of the seedlings from the tree in Amsterdam was bound for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Lauren Bairnsfather, the chief executive of the Anne Frank Center USA, said that seedling was quarantined in a nursery in Indiana, where horticulturists “made grafts from the original tree” that grew into saplings, including the one for Wagner. Two others have been planted in New York City.

Bairnsfather said Wagner was a noteworthy site because the Holocaust center has focused on women’s experiences in the Holocaust, which she said were often neglected in scholarly studies and teaching. But she also said the spot where the tree was planted made a statement.

“They chose that location so when people come to campus, this is what they see,” she said. “We want the tree to become part of the identity.”

Weather

Expect sunny skies and a high in the low 80s. Tonight, there will be increasing clouds with a low around 63.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The building is going to be out of service, pending repairs.” — David Simms, an assistant fire chief, after an electrical fire damaged the Eugene O’Neill Theater. As a result, “The Book of Mormon,” which has run there for 15 years, has canceled performances today and tomorrow, and producers did not say when they would resume.

The latest Metro news

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani remained in critical condition yesterday, recovering from pneumonia in a hospital in Florida, his spokesman said.

The spokesman, Ted Goodman, said that Giuliani, 81, had needed a ventilator to breathe after he was hospitalized. But Goodman said yesterday that the former mayor was now breathing on his own. Goodman also said that Giuliani “is the ultimate fighter — as he has demonstrated throughout his life — and he is winning this battle.”

Goodman announced on Sunday that Giuliani was in the hospital but did not say then what his symptoms were. Goodman said yesterday that Giuliani had been diagnosed with restrictive airway disease stemming from his proximity to ground zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The condition makes respiratory illnesses more threatening, Goodman said.

My colleague Jonah E. Bromwich writes that it is unclear whether Giuliani has publicly mentioned such a diagnosis before. But the former mayor has noted that he was a frequent presence at the Trade Center site, and in recent years his lawyers have alluded to potential lung disease related to toxicity from the attacks.

Last summer, Giuliani sustained a fractured vertebra when the car he was a passenger in was rear-ended in New Hampshire, where he had become a regular as he seemed to let his attachment to New York wane. He arrived in a wheelchair at the annual ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan in September. He was photographed that day smiling with a body brace strapped under his suit jacket, over his shirt and tie.

METROPOLITAN diary

Along the park

Dear Diary:

It was April Fools’ Day, and the weather kept changing from sunny to drizzle, as if the gusty wind was moving the sun back and forth behind a cloud.

I put my jacket on and off as I walked along Prospect Park. The trees were still bare, but spring was slowly awakening with yellow forsythias, and every child walking by stared at my new purple hair, hungry for color.

A guy in the bike lane yelled, “Hey!”

I turned to him.

“Sorry,” he said, pointing to someone else. “I’m talking to this guy.”

“But you actually look familiar,” I said.

“So do you,” he said, laughing.

I entered the park to hear pop music near the band shell. Two people with a portable speaker were dancing.

I wanted to join the party, but I realized that I hear the music, so I’m in the party. I danced along from a distance.

From high above, hundreds of blackbirds swooped down like falling peppercorn into the black-and-white woods ahead. As I got closer, I saw specks of tiny green buds emerging on each tree limb.

I left the park, passing three people who had converged because their dogs could not contain their joy. The people laughed like old friends, but within seconds they had walked off separate ways.

As I passed Seeley Street, I overheard a friend through the open window, cheering on a drum student.

I laughed. I should be getting home before the possible rain, I thought, but today, everywhere was home.

— Mare Berger

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.