Rare Anne Frank poem to be auctioned

A very rare handwritten poem by Jewish diarist Anne Frank will go under the auctioneer’s hammer Wednesday, amid a flurry of interest which may push the price well above the 30,000 euros ($32,000) reserve.

“These things are so rare that I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Thys Blankevoort, co-director of the Bubb Kuyper auction house based in the western Dutch town of Haarlem.

“Any document that’s written by Anne Frank is rare,” he tells AFP Monday, adding only about four or five items signed by her had come to light in the past 40 years.

Dedicated to “Dear Cri-cri,” the poem, written in Dutch in black ink on a notebook-size piece of white paper which has slightly discolored with age, is signed “in memory, from Anne Frank.”

Frank wrote the 12-line text, dated March 28, 1942, in a friendship book belonging to the older sister of her best friend only three months before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam.

The poem is being sold by Jacqueline van Maarsen, Frank’s primary school friend, who over the years has worked to keep her pal’s story alive. Frank also wrote a poem in Jacqueline’s book, but she is too attached to it to sell it, Blankevoort says.

While the first four lines of the text are well-known among such poems “written by girls, for girls,” the auction house has so far not traced the origins of the final four lines.

— AFP