The U.S. Mission to the United Nations marked Anne Frank’s 97th birthday on Friday, standing together “in silent reflection” at the Anne Frank Tree, a memorial site located in the garden of the U.N. Headquarters in New York City.
The mission posted a photo of its staff on X, saying that the gesture was made “to remember the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust and to recommit ourselves to longstanding U.S. leadership on promoting tolerance and combatting rising global antisemitism.”
We stood today in silent reflection at the UN Anne Frank Tree on her 97th birthday to remember the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust and to recommit ourselves to longstanding U.S. leadership on promoting tolerance and combatting rising global antisemitism.… pic.twitter.com/HAtSZqNo0P
— U.S. Mission to the UN (@USUN) June 12, 2026
The tree commemorating Anne Frank was donated by the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in 2019 and was planted as a sapling. It descends from the horse chestnut tree that grew outside the annex in which the Frank family sought refuge from the Nazis from 1942 to 1944, according to the U.N.
The German-born Jewish diarist was murdered at the age of 16 in February or March 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Her life’s story was made famous posthumously after a diary that she kept, documenting her time in hiding in an Amsterdam attic, was retrieved by her father, Otto Frank, the only survivor in the family.
It was published in 1952 in English as The Diary of a Young Girl. The diary in its original Dutch has been translated into more than 70 languages.
