Premise: "Our horse chestnut is in full bloom," Anne Frank told her diary on Saturday, May 13, 1944, "thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year." She would have been 79 this year, turning 80. Had she survived, Miss Frank would still be able to see the horse chestnut tree by which she measured the seasons of life during her two years of hiding from the Nazis, not just behind the building in Amsterdam from which she and her family were taken by the Gestapo in 1944 but — if the plans of the Anne Frank Center USA are realized — at 10 sites around this country, including New York City.
Hypothesis: Anne Frank was taken in the summer of 1944