Auction of Anne Frank poem will help finance Holocaust centre

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 on Thursday. The sisters are not Jewish.

In November, van Maarsen auctioned off the poem, which is dated March 28, 1942.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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