Rare handwritten poem sells for 60 Million Naira

A rare handwritten poem by Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose diaries became one of the most profound documents of the Holocaust, was sold at auction in the Netherlands for $148,000 (60 million Naira).

The sale took place at the Bubb Kuyper auction house in the Dutch city of Haarlem.

The text was a rare example of Anne’s handwriting for sale. “Over the last 40 years, only four or five documents signed by the teenager have gone under the hammer,” Thijs Blankevoort, the auction house’s co-director, said.

The poem, written in black ink on a notebook-sized piece of white paper that has slightly discoloured with age, was addressed “Dear Cri-cri,” and signed “In memory, from Anne Frank.”

The poem reads:

Dear Cri-Cri,

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 answer one can make.

In memory of Anne Frank

The text in Dutch was dated 28 March 1942, three months before Anne and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. CNN reported.

Anne Frank was 13 when she and her family began hiding in a dark and damp "secret annex" of a house in Amsterdam to escape the roundup of Jews in Holland in July 1942.

For two years, she never left the house, spending much of her time writing in her diary. But then Anne and her family were found and arrested by the Nazis in August 1944.

She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp sometime around March 1945. Her diary survived to tell her tragic and inspiring story.

Her book Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl is read and used to teach Holocaust around the world.

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