Anne Frank's tree, now dying, still inspires hope and new life

(News Terupdate) - This is a story about a girl and her tree -- a tree that helped keep hope alive, even as the world closed in on her.

Three times in Anne Frank's widely read diary, the young Holocaust victim wrote about a tree. She could see it from the attic window of the secret annex where her family hid for two years, before being betrayed.

"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," she wrote on February 23, 1944. "As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be."

The tree that reminded Frank of the promise of life still looms high above the courtyard behind the Anne Frank House, now a museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, that just marked its 50th anniversary. But at about 170 years of age, Anne Frank's tree is dying.

The spring before her family and the others hiding with them were captured, the girl focused on the tree's budding life -- and her own.

"Our chestnut tree is already quite greenish and you can even see little blooms here and there," she wrote on April 18, 1944. Two days earlier, she'd recorded her first kiss.

Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just weeks before the Nazi concentration camp was liberated in 1945. But her name, story and message live on through her diary and, also, through her ailing tree.

The tree that keeps giving

The tree has been sick for 10 years; a fungus has left two-thirds of it hollow, said Anne Frank House spokeswoman Annemarie Bekker.

A battle began in late 2007 between city officials who wanted to chop it down and activists who insisted it stay. But a court injunction, a second-opinion analysis and a committee mobilization later, it still stands, barely alive and supported by steel.

About five years ago, the museum began collecting chestnuts from the tree to grow seedlings, so that pieces of the original tree could take root and flourish elsewhere. The tree is a horse chestnut, which is often called a buckeye tree in the United States and a conker tree in the United Kingdom.

Its saplings have been distributed to international parks and schools named for Anne Frank. One will be planted later this year at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Through a project and contest launched last year by the Anne Frank Center USA, a New York-based educational nonprofit working with the museum in Amsterdam, 11 sites in the United States will see Frank's tree blossom. They range from the White House and various museums and memorials to a high school that changed U.S. history.

A handful of winning applications were driven by youth inspired by Frank, who would be 80 if she'd survived, and her diary.

One girl in Boston, Massachusetts,12-year-old Aliyah Finkel, felt an immediate connection to the writer, so much so that she chose to have her bat mitzvah -- the coming of age ceremony for Jewish girls -- in the synagogue Frank's family attended in Amsterdam before they went into hiding.

"It wasn't just a diary written by some person, it was written by a 13-year-old girl," Finkel said. "I was interested in the story of her life. She had so much hope. There are some parts [of the diary] that are really sad, but it's more inspiring."

With the help of her family, and contacts they have with local officials, Finkel's inspired push will bring a tree to Boston Common and lessons about tolerance to the city's public schools.

Down South, a public school in Arkansas, the only in the nation to become a national historic site, will also see an Anne Frank tree bloom.

Little Rock Central High School senior John Allen Riggins, 17, heard about the contest last summer while listening to National Public Radio.

His school was racially integrated in 1957 by the "Little Rock Nine," a development that proved a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement. An avid follower of history and politics, Riggins saw parallels between Anne Frank's legacy and that of the Arkansas students.

"From all across the world, in different time periods and different social struggles, young people have been caught up in history and these social tensions have come down upon them," Riggins said. "Anne Frank was 14 when she was hiding, and the youngest of the nine was 14."

For Elaine Leeder, it was in many ways her father's youth, and by extension her own, that made her reach out for a part of the tree.

The dean of social sciences at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, Leeder is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her father lost his mother, sister and brother when they were taken to a pit outside their Lithuanian village and gunned down with about 2,000 other Jews.

"The shades were always drawn in my house. We were afraid of neighbors," she said, describing the legacy she carried. "I became a genocide scholar over the years because of my personal story."

The sapling she competed for will be nurtured in the university's Holocaust & Genocide Memorial Grove, where genocides across time are remembered. Beside it will be a sign quoting Frank: "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Much of what his daughter wrote came as a surprise to Otto Frank, the family's sole survivor. He retrieved the diary and eventually published it after World War II. More than 30 million copies have been sold.

In a speech he gave in 1968, according to the Anne Frank House, he spoke of the reactions he had upon first reading his daughter's words.

"How could I have suspected that it meant so much to Anne to see a patch of blue sky, to observe the gulls during their flight and how important the chestnut tree was to her, as I recall that she never took an interest in nature," he said. "But she longed for it during that time when she felt like a caged bird."

It turns out the saplings selected for sites in the United States are caged themselves. When they arrived in the country in December, the young trees were seized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because of sicknesses ravaging horse chestnuts in Europe, the trees will remain in quarantine for three years.

The tree Frank secretly admired through an attic window will be gone in five to 15 years, Anne Frank House officials say. But by the time it disappears, pieces of it will be growing strong, reaching for blue skies and welcoming birds across the globe -- a living legacy to a girl who understood what life could promise.

Source : CNN

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Cold case: 'Precious' girl vanished in '77

New York (News Terupdate) - Eva Debruhl, 15, was last seen nearly 33 years ago, cutting the front lawn of her family's home in Rock Hill, South Carolina, with a push mower.

"Eva loved to cut grass, as we both did,'' said her older sister, Tami Settlemyer, 49. "There was just something about cutting grass that we both enjoyed.''

But Debruhl wasn't at the door to greet her sister when she came home from her summer job at the local textile mill late in the afternoon of June 29, 1977. She had missed lunch with her grandmother, who lived in another house on the family's 9-acre spread. And Debruhl's best friend's family had not seen her, either.

Fear and panic quickly set in as the family realized that Debruhl was nowhere to be found.

Her sister describes Debruhl as "precious." She loved children and singing in the church choir, and she could recite from the Bible. "She was so sweet and innocent,'' her sister said.

Police searched the property, and Debruhl's family, friends and neighbors joined forces to look for her.

"Soon, days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, but we never stopped looking,'' Settlemyer said.

Debruhl's father quit his job, devoting himself to the search. Her parents sold their house that fall to pay for a private investigator.

"Eva was the baby of our family, and we treated her like that," Settlemyer said. "My parents were just heartbroken.''

It was the family's second tragedy. Four years earlier, a drunken driver killed Debruhl's 11-year-old brother in front of the house as he and a friend walked to a church playground to play basketball.

To this day, police have had few clues to follow in Debruhl's disappearance.

There were no signs of forced entry, and police told the family that whoever may have taken Debruhl knew their home and their schedule.

Debruhl's grandmother said she recalled seeing a blue or green truck with a white top drive up to the property on the day the teen vanished.

A man got out and knocked on the door to Debruhl's house. She said she didn't get a good look at him because he had his back to her, according to the police report.

The vehicle drove off and returned about 10 minutes later, and the grandmother could not see who was in it. She didn't pay a lot of attention because Debruhl's father repaired autos, and strangers would often visit to have work done.

The truck and the man were never located.

Another potential clue was a Coke bottle Debruhl's father found in the yard, where the truck had pulled over.

The bottle was made in Georgia, indicating that whoever dropped it may have been from out of state. A Coca-Cola bottling plant in Rock Hill served South and North Carolina, Settlemyer said.

Yet the bottle was not dusted for fingerprints.

Over the years, Debruhl's family was approached by people who demanded money for information on the teen's whereabouts. In a sting operation, Debruhl's mother met one man who wanted $15,000. Police arrested him. He was convicted of extortion, Settlemyer said.

More than once, Debruhl's parents were called to the medical examiner's office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to view unidentified remains, but they weren't Debruhl's.

At one point in the investigation, it was believed that Henry Lee Lucas, a drifter who claimed to have killed hundreds of people in dozens of states, may have been in the area about the time Debruhl disappeared.

A sheriff's representative and Debruhl's father went to Texas in the 1980s when Lucas was arrested there. Lucas said he could not recall whether he killed anyone in the area or even whether he had been there, Settlemyer said.

Years ago, one sheriff's investigator was so involved in the case that he worked it on his days off, searching, digging and looking for hard-to-find clues.

The current lead investigator, Capt. Jerry Hoffman of the York County Sheriff's Office, has an Eva Debruhl case file the size of a banker's box.

Following up on a tip, police recently dug up a well and the property once owned by Debruhl's family. In other searches, cadaver dogs found nothing. A forensic psychologist was brought in to use hypnotism on one person who was interviewed.

"This one is a little more frustrating,'' Hoffman said.

Settlemyer says she knows that someone out there knows exactly what happened to Debruhl, who was 5'1'' and 105 pounds when she vanished. She was blonde, had blue eyes and wore glasses. She was last seen in blue shorts and yellow blouse.

Settlemyer believes that her sister is dead but still speaks of hope when asked about the case.

"All we want and all we have ever wanted is closure. We have already forgiven that person,'' she said. "We know that person will have another judge that will give them the punishment they need.''

Anyone with more information is asked to call the York County Sheriff's Office at 1-803-628-3059 or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST.

Source : CNN

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Ohio executes murderer of teen

(News Terupdate) - An Ohio death row inmate was executed Tuesday for the 1988 murder of a 16-year-old girl, officials said.

Darryl Durr, 46, was pronounced dead at 10:36 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. He was executed by lethal injection for killing 16-year-old Angel Vincent in 1988.

Vincent, a friend of Durr's girlfriend at the time, was abducted from her Elyria, Ohio, home on January 31, 1988. Her body was found nearly three months later, stuffed into two traffic barrels placed together at a park, according to an account of the case given by the Ohio Supreme Court in a 1991 decision and cited by the Ohio Parole Board.

Durr's girlfriend at first told Vincent's mother that the girl must have run away. She came forward after Durr was arrested for two unrelated rapes in September 1988 and told police she knew Durr had abducted and killed Vincent, according to the parole board. She said she had been afraid to speak out because he had threatened her life and that of her child.

Durr did not request a special last meal Monday night but had a dinner served to other prisoners -- beef and noodles, greens, cauliflower, peaches, apple sauce, white bread and Kool-Aid, according to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. However, Durr did not eat the meal, the facility said.

Interviewed by the parole board in 2009, Durr said that "he wished to convey his apologies to the victims for their tragic loss" but maintained his innocence in Vincent's death. The board -- in a 7-0 vote -- denied Durr's clemency request.

Durr was one of two Ohio death row inmates whom Gov. Ted Strickland granted temporary reprieves in October amid confusion over capital punishment in the state. The moves came after the botched execution attempt of Romell Broom in September, which raised questions about the state's lethal injection procedure. Technicians tried without success for two hours on September 15 to find suitable veins on Broom to insert the deadly chemical cocktail.

Ohio switched to a new one-drug method of lethal injection and began using it in December. The method had never been tried on U.S. death row inmates. It relies on a single dose of sodium thiopental injected into a vein.

Source : CNN

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