Handwritten Anne Frank Poem Fetches Nearly $150,000 At Dutch Auction

A rare handwritten poem signed by Anne Frank when she was 12-years-old was auctioned Wednesday for $148,620 in the Netherlands, USA Today reported. The 8-line poem was written in 1942 shortly before Anne and her Jewish family were forced to seek hiding from German occupation in a secret Amsterdam canal house due to their faith. It was sold to an unidentified online bidder.

The online buyer will receive a letter of authenticity from its seller, Anne’ former school friend Jacqueline Van Maarsen. The poem written for Van Maarsen’s late sister, Christiane, is addressed “Dear Cri-Cri,” Reuters reported Wednesday. The first four lines of the poem were copied from a Dutch magazine and encourage Christiane Van Maarsen to apply herself more in school. The second four lines, which may have come from Frank herself, expresses to her close friend that the best way to answer critics was to work harder and do a better job.

In the accompanying authenticity note, Jacqueline Van Maarsen said she was selling her sister's poem because it hadn’t been important to Christiane. She said she, too, was given a poem from Frank.

“I know that my sister was not as attached to this verse from Anne to her as I am to the verse Anne addressed to me, and that is the reason that I am now putting it up for sale,” Van Maarsen said in the note.

Anne Frank is one of over one million Jewish children who lost their lives during the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is revered throughout the Jewish community for the publication of her diary "The Diary of a Young Girl," which portrays her life while hiding from Nazi officers during World War II. Her dairy, which has become one of the most important documents to emerge out of the Holocaust, describes the two years living in the apartment on top of a warehouse in Amsterdam before being betrayed and arrested by Germans on August 1944 and deported.

Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp at age 15, weeks before it was liberated in 1945.