Auction of Anne Frank poem will finance Holocaust memorial

$50,000 from sale of text to go towards commemorative wall in Amsterdam with names of more than 102,000 Dutch Jews killed by Nazis

By JTA 20 May 2017, 10:44 am
This photo taken on November 21, 2016 at the Bubb Kuyper auction house in Haarlem shows a rare handwritten poem by Anne Frank, penned shortly before she went into hiding from the Nazis, addressed to "Cri-Cri" or Christiane van Maarsen, signed by the Jewish teenager and dated March 28, 1942. (AFP PHOTO/Maude BRULARD)

AMSTERDAM — A friend of Anne Frank who recently sold a poem handwritten by the teenage diarist for $155,000 has donated a third of the money to the building of a Holocaust memorial for Dutch Jews.

Jacqueline van Maarsen, who was a childhood friend of Anne Frank, received the poem in the 1970s from her sister, Christiane, who gave her the poem because Jacqueline was closer to Anne, the NOS public broadcaster reported Thursday. The sisters are not Jewish.

In November, van Maarsen auctioned off the poem, which is dated March 28, 1942. She told NOS that she will donate a little over $50,000 from the proceeds for the building of a commemorative wall featuring the names of more than 102,000 Dutch Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

Addressed to “Cri-Cri,” Christiane van Maarsen, the poem was signed by Anne Frank. While the first four lines of the text are well known among such poems “written by girls, for girls,” the Bubb Kuyper auction house that sold the poem has so far not traced the origins of the final four lines.

A man shows a handwritten poem by Anne Frank, written shortly before she went into hiding from the Nazis, at the auction Bubb Kuyper in Haarlem on November 22, 2016. (AFP PHOTO / ANP / Koen Suyk / Netherlands)

“The second half might possibly even be composed by” Anne Frank, Bubb Kuyper co-director Thys Blankevoort acknowledged. It follows the vein of such poems which often contained a moral about love and friendship, calling on girls to work hard and be diligent.

A series of letters between Anne and her sister Margot with American penpals sold for $165,000 in 1988. And a 1925 edition of Grimm’s fairy tales, with both girls’ names written on the title page, went for $62,500 in May in a New York auction — fetching twice the estimated price.

The text, written in Dutch and translated by the Daily Mail, reads in full:

If you did not finish your work properly,
And lost precious time,
Then once again take up your task
And try harder than before.
If others have reproached you
For what you have done wrong,
Then be sure to amend your mistake.
That is the best memory one can make.

A memorial stone for Anne Frank and her sister Margot on the grounds of the former Prisoner of War (POW) and concentration camps Bergen-Belsen in Bergen, north of Hanover, central Germany, on June 21, 2015. (AFP / NIGEL TREBLIN)

The Frank family went into hiding in Amsterdam three months after the poem was penned. They were discovered, arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps in 1944. Anne Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany in 1945.

Anne wrote in hiding about her life under Nazi occupation. Her diaries were edited and then published by her father, Otto, who was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. The book, “The Diary of a Young Girl,” has been translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies.

Times of Israel staff and AFP contributed to this report.

read more: