Sixty-two years after dying of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Anne Frank continues to haunt countless readers of her diary, with its youthful exuberance, dry humor and shattering hints of the violence that would sweep away her world. But fewer people know of the soaring chestnut tree that gave comfort to Anne while she and her family hid for more than two years during the German occupation....

In recent years, fresh ills have befallen the tree: fungi have turned almost half its trunk to white rot, and a moth infestation has attacked its crown. The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported last year that botanists had spent months running tests and observing the tree, but their efforts did not improve its condition significantly. So local officials said it had to be felled.

But now, endless administrative procedures appear to have given the tree, which has stood for a century and a half, a fresh lease on life.