Students visit Seton Hill for dedication of Anne Frank tree

Students from two area schools visited Seton Hill University and its National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education on Thursday for the dedication of the Anne Frank tree at the university.

Christ the Divine Teacher School in Latrobe and St. Therese School in Munhall were represented for a reading of excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary, including passages in which she wrote about the tree outside a window where she was in hiding during the World War II Holocaust.

The sapling at the Greensburg campus was grown from the horse chestnut tree that towered behind the secret annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and others hid.

The school students attended an Art and the Holocaust Workshop led by art therapist Elizabeth Hlavek. The students made visual art related to the Holocaust and listened to music composed by those incarcerated in ghettos and camps during the Holocaust.

Anne Frank was a teenager from Frankfurt, Germany, who was forced to go into hiding. The sapling project began in 2009 with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam’s efforts to preserve the original chestnut tree by gathering and germinating chestnuts and donating the saplings to organizations dedicated to Anne Frank’s memory.