Squirrel Hill school dedicates tree sired from Anne Frank’s inspiration
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From her hiding place in the attic of a house in Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s view of the world was small but beautiful — the sky, birds, and her kastanjeboom — the Dutch word for a horse chestnut tree.
The Jewish teenager mentioned the towering tree three times in her famous “The Diary of a Young Girl,” in 1944. The first entry, on Feb. 23, is the most poetic, perhaps because she was with her boyfriend, Peter.
“The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak. ... As long as this exists, I thought … I cannot be unhappy.”
On May 6, students and staff as well as families and friends of Community Day School in Squirrel Hill marked Yom HaShoah, honoring the 6 million Jews and nearly as many others killed by the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s.
There were candles, songs, the mourner’s Kaddish and a chestnut tree, a young sapling grown from the seed of Anne’s tree, which fell in a storm in 2010. It doesn’t look like much yet, but its message is mighty.
“God willing, this tree will last hundreds of years,” said Lauren Bairnsfather, of Edgewood, CEO of Anne Frank Center USA and former director of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.
The Squirrel Hill tree, one of six planted in the U.S. and more than a dozen planted around the world, was dedicated to the memory of Holocaust survivors Moshe and Malka Baran, parents of Avi Baran Munro, who is retiring this month after 20 years as Community Day School’s head of school.
“My parents’ legacy was to find joy in Judaism,” she said. “So many others have lost faith.”
It would have been easy to lose hope when his hometown in Poland was turned into a barbed wire-enclosed ghetto when Moshe was 21. Yet he managed to escape, free his mother and two siblings and join the partisan resistance (his father and sister were unable to escape and were murdered).
His wife, Malka, lost her parents and younger brother at the hands of the Nazis and spent the war in a labor camp in her native Poland.
“She came out with no hatred,” Avi said when her mother died in 2007. “She blacked out a lot of her experiences, but she always remembered the few times people were kind.”
The Barans moved to Pittsburgh in 1993 to be close to Avi, her husband Paul and their four children, all of whom attended Community Day School.
Avi, 66, said it is bittersweet to retire from the school that has meant so much to her and her family, which now includes two grandchildren. “But I’m at peace with it.”
Eighth-graders take the lead in the school’s annual Yom HaShoah
ceremony honoring those who died and the heroism displayed during the Shoah, a Hebrew word for “catastrophe” that is preferred over Holocaust — Greek for “sacrifice by fire.”
Six candles were lit for all the victims — Jews, Roma, LGBTQ+, political, disabled, and young and old.
Among the students who read narratives about relatives was Ben Mazare, whose great-grandmother, Chaya Tuvel, was 10 years old when she witnessed the murder of her family through a peephole in a closet in Ukraine. She escaped to the woods, living in the wilderness with partisans for five years, and immigrated to Israel after the war.
“April is glorious. … Our chestnut tree is in leaf, and here and there you can already see a few small blossoms.” — Anne Frank, April 18, 1944, two days after her first kiss.
Community Day School’s horse chestnut tree is planted next to “Keeping Tabs” the Gary and Nancy Tuckfelt Holocaust Sculpture.
Begun in 1996 by a nonJewish teacher to illustrate the human toll of the Shoah, the sculpture was designed by students in the shape of a broken Jewish star. Its glass blocks contain 6 million pop tabs collected over 17 years.
Avi was proud to see it finished and dedicated during her tenure as head of school.
“It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when hate is allowed to become action,” she said.
“… The sun was shining as it’s never shown before in 1944. Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.” — Anne Frank, May 13, 1944.
Twenty years ago, I planted a horse chestnut tree
in my yard hoping it would someday offer some shade on our deck and driveway. Two weeks ago, it blossomed profusely for the first time, with dozens of white, candleshaped flowers on its branches. I can see it from my office in our attic.
Ruth Apter, of White Oak, suggested planting one of the special chestnut trees at Community Day School shortly after her daughter, Lauren, became CEO of Anne Frank USA in January. Ruth and her husband, Scott, have been active supporters of the school for years and two of their grandsons attended.
“It’s difficult to get your kids educated in some meaningful way,” Scott said after the ceremony, where his daughter read an excerpt from “The Diary of a Young Girl” dated June 13, 1944:
“Is it because I haven’t been outdoors for so long that I’ve become so smitten with nature? ... Nature makes me feel humble and ready to face every blow with courage!”
Anne’s last diary entry was dated Tuesday, Aug. 1, 1944. Three days later, her hiding place of two years was raided by police and members of her family and Peter’s family were taken to Westerbork, a German concentration camp in the Netherlands.
They were on the last train that carried Jews from Holland to Auschwitz on Sept. 3 and then were sent to Bergen-Belsen in November.
In February 1945, Anne and her sister, Margot, both contracted typhus. Anne died a day after her sister in March 1945.