Hiding from the Nazis in a small Amsterdam apartment, Anne Frank often gazed at a huge chestnut tree* visible through an attic* skylight* — her only window to the outside world — and dreamed of freedom.

Now, a group of tree conservationists* and local activists are fighting to prevent the badly diseased tree from being cut down, saying it is a living link to the memory of the teenage diarist, who died in a concentration camp* at the age of 15.

“It’s a monument to the spirit of what Anne Frank wrote, hope and light, which she did not have,” said Sylvio Mutal, a neighbor whose study overlooks* the courtyard* where the tree is growing.

Mutal, a former consultant to the U.N. on the preservation of monuments, called a decision by the City of Amsterdam to fell the tree a “betrayal,” after earlier promises to wait until January 1 to consider a salvage* plan.

The ancient tree suffers from a fungus* that has caused more than half its trunk to rot. The city gave the order to have it cut down, saying it was in danger of falling.

But opponents, including the Netherlands’ Trees Institute, argued the tree was a living historical monument worthy of salvage.

The tree stands behind the attic where the Frank family hid during Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.

The Jewish teenager kept her diary while she remained indoors for 25 months before the family was arrested in August 1944. Her diary was preserved and later published and has now been read by millions of people. Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.

“Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs,” she wrote on February 23, 1944.

“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. ...

“As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy,” she wrote in the diary.

(SD-Agencies)