{"id":554,"date":"2006-11-15T10:35:22","date_gmt":"2006-11-15T08:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.breigh.com\/wordpress\/archives\/554"},"modified":"2010-08-25T16:38:55","modified_gmt":"2010-08-25T14:38:55","slug":"just-a-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/archives\/554","title":{"rendered":"Just a Tree?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When I moved to the Netherlands in 1999, one of the first things I did was visit the Anne Frank House<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 Years before, when I was in high school, I went through a period where I read a lot of books about the holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0 I had just learned about it in history class and I couldn’t read enough about it.\u00a0\u00a0 I read book after book, history books and survivor autobiographies…<\/p>\n

The most memorable was The Diary of Anne Frank<\/a>.\u00a0 The story of a young Jewish girl who goes into hiding with her family during the holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0 They hide in an attic hidden behind a bookcase and while in there she writes about her life, dreams, fears and frustrations.\u00a0 Until they are betrayed and given up to the Nazis, after which she is sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.\u00a0\u00a0It’s there that she\u00a0dies of Typhus\u00a0seven months later in March 1945.<\/p>\n

As a teenage girl\u00a0in Nova Scotia, I never dreamed that one day I would live in the Netherlands and stand in the same place as this young girl.\u00a0 That I’d climb those same stairs behind the bookcase and stand in the tiny bedroom where she spent all that time dreaming, looking at the same photos of the movie stars she’d stuck the wall.<\/p>\n

… or looking out the same window she gazed out of every day at the chestnut tree that now, just over 50 years later, is going to be cut down<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cOur chestnut tree is in full blossom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year…\u201d – Anne Frank, 13 May 1944<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There has been a lot of commotion made about the cutting down of this tree.\u00a0 Not only because it’s one of the oldest chestnut trees in Amsterdam but because of its historical significance.<\/p>\n

This is the tree that Anne wrote about in her diary.\u00a0 One of the only things she could see of the outside world and the only thing of beauty in her life for those years she was in the attic.<\/p>\n

Is it just a tree… ?\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t know, but I once stood in the spot this photo was taken\u00a0and for just a moment saw what she saw… and it’s something I’ve never forgotten.\u00a0\u00a0It’s a shame that soon others won’t be able to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I moved to the Netherlands in 1999, one of the first things I did was visit the Anne Frank House.\u00a0\u00a0 Years before, when I was in high school, I went through a period where I read a lot of books about the holocaust.\u00a0\u00a0 I had just learned about it in history class and I …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-life-in-nl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5554,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/5554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}