* Fungus-infected tree saved from felling in 2007 
 
 
 
 * Tree misses Anne Frank House, no injuries reported 
 
 
 
 * Pieces of the tree offered for sale on Internet 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 (Adds support group comments) 
 
 
 
 By Aaron Gray-Block 
 
 
 
 AMSTERDAM, Aug 23 (Reuters) - A giant chestnut tree that comforted Dutch diarist Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic during World War Two collapsed in heavy wind and rain on Monday. No one was hurt and the 150-year old tree fell across a fence, missing the Anne Frank House, which has been turned into a museum and was full of tourists. The tree was one of the few signs of nature visible to the Jewish teenager from the concealed attic she hid in for over two years during World War Two and it is mentioned in the diary which became a worldwide best-seller after her death in a concentration camp in 1945. She also wrote: "As long as this exists, ... and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies _ while this lasts I cannot be unhappy." A global campaign to save the chestnut, widely known as The Anne Frank Tree, was launched in 2007 after city officials deemed it a safety hazard and ordered it felled. But officials and conservationists later agreed to secure it with a steel frame to prolong its life and saplings from the tree were planted last year in an Amsterdam park and other cities around the world.
– A tree beloved by Anne Frank is gone, toppled by a storm today in Amsterdam. The chestnut tree stood outside the window of the attic where Frank hid, and she often wrote about it in her diaries. In the years since her death, the 150-year-old “Anne Frank Tree” became rotted and diseased; city officials ordered it felled, but a 2007 campaign managed to save it. Its trunk was encased in a steep support system, but even that failed to protect it from today’s strong winds, the AP reports. No one was hurt, and the nearby Anne Frank House museum was unharmed. The tree lives on through more than 160 clones planted in Amsterdam and the US. “From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind,” Frank wrote in 1944. Pieces of the tree are now for sale on a Dutch auction site, Reuters adds.