Saplings grown from a chestnut tree that inspired Holocaust victim Anne Frank have taken root at places around the globe — including at Greensburg’s Seton Hill University, where officials believe it can provide the same hope Frank expressed in her famous diary.
The university on Wednesday planted a sapling donated by the Anne Frank Center USA at a hilltop site along Seton Hill Drive — between the main school campus and the mother house of the Catholic Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill, who founded the institution of higher learning in 1918.
Sister Gemma DelDuca, 93, a past member of the university faculty, was among those on hand to welcome the new tree.
“It really will be a source of inspiration for young people,” she said. “Having this tree planted here is a sign of hope for someone as old as I am and for someone as young as a newborn baby.”
Amid growing antisemitism, the horse chestnut “will give courage and encouragement,” said DelDuca. She is one of the founders of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill, the recipient of one of 21 saplings distributed so far by Anne Frank Center USA.
The tree is expected to further the educational missions of both the Seton Hill and the Anne Frank centers.
The Center for Holocaust Education’s activities include hosting an international conference on the topic every three years while helping to prepare area educators to teach middle school and high school students about the Holocaust.
“This is an opportunity for us to continue that educational outreach, to bring local students here to our campus to learn about Anne Frank and to see the tree that meant so much to her. She mentions it several times in her diary,” center Director James Paharik said. “It’s a way to help us in our mission to help young people learn about the Holocaust and the dangers of antisemitism and extremism.”
The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators during the era of World War II.
Frank, a Jewish teenager, fled with her family from Germany to Amsterdam to hide from the Nazis. But their hiding place was betrayed, and Frank was taken to a concentration camp. She died of typhus at age 15, just weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops.
Frank’s diary, published posthumously in 1947, has been recognized as an expression of hope in the face of despair and hardship. In three diary entries in 1944, she wrote about the chestnut tree she could view from her hiding place, marking the changing of the seasons.
“As long as this exists, how can I be sad?” she wrote.
“When it bloomed, it seemed like hope for her and the promise of new possibilities,” Paharik said of the Amsterdam chestnut. “The original tree is gone, but these saplings remain. It means a lot to be one of the few places in the country that has a sapling.”
Seton Hill President Mary C. Finger said the sapling donation resulted from the university center’s longstanding relationship with Anne Frank Center USA CEO Lauren Bairnsfather, who previously served as executive director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and has been involved with the university conferences.
Finger said the university is planning to hold a blessing and dedication ceremony for the tree next fall and intends to create a landscaped area surrounding it near Farrell Hall.
“We will be building a space for reflection, thought and prayer,” Finger said.
The chestnut tree mentioned by Frank was blown over by a storm in 2010, Bairnsfather said. But it already had been declining in health, prompting the Anne Frank House organization in Amsterdam to grow seedlings for distribution to groups around the world.
Anne Frank Center USA was one of the original recipients and has continued to propagate descendants of the tree at a nursery near Indianapolis. The resulting saplings have been transplanted to sites including the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations headquarters and 9/11 Memorial in New York City.
In Pennsylvania, saplings are growing at Gratz College in the Philadelphia area, at Pittsburgh’s Community Day School, and now at Seton Hill.
“It’s just a perfect place for this tree,” said Bairnsfather. “I thought these trees should go to places of learning, to places that have a commitment to Holocaust education. I call it our living memorial.”
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In addition to distributing the saplings, she said, Anne Frank Center USA provides theatrical performances and artist workshops for schools.
“As we lose our (Holocaust) survivors, we need to find other ways to make an emotional connection,” she said. “Art opens up an emotional connection.”
Seton Hill’s sapling commands a view overlooking Greensburg and is across the road from the cemetery where Sisters of Charity are laid to rest.
“Each time that we have a funeral now we will also be remembering Anne Frank,” DelDuca said. “Many of us will pay visits here.”