Did Will-I-Am Knock Down Anne Frank’s Tree?

Will-I-Am’s been quiet lately, hasn’t he? Since making that song from that movie that nobody went to see at the start of the summer, he’s been oddly removed from the public eye. You think, maybe he’s working on a new Black Eyed Peas album or something? Or a 3D concert film with James Cameron? Well, it turns out he’s been in Europe. You know what else is in Europe? Amsterdam. What else is happening in Amsterdam? Oh, right, the 150-year-old chestnut tree that was a rare source of comfort and joy for Anne Frank for the two years she spent hiding in an attic during the Holocaust was destroyed this weekend.

Anne Frank would look out the window at the tree, and write about in her diary.

“Our chestnut tree is in full blossom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.”

She wrote that in May, 1944, three months before being discovered and captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, and then Bergen-Belson, where she died of typhoid at the age of 15, just a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp.

A few months earlier, in February, she’d written,

“Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favourite 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 windAs long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”

But now that tree is gone, and it is Will-I-Am’s fault.