A very rare handwritten poem by Jewish diarist Anne Frank goes 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," said 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 told AFP Monday, adding only about four or five items signed by her had come to light in the past 40 years.
"There are some chance finds, some books from the libraries. But these are not manuscripts, they are owner entries," he added, referring to books which have been found with Frank's name written inside.
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 Diary of a Young Girl," which Frank penned while in hiding from June 1942 to August 1944 has sold more than 30 million copies in 67 languages.
She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in early 1945 less than a year after the Nazis captured her and just before the end of World War II.
israelnationalnews
Gedicht van Anne Frank te koop
Gedicht van Anne Frank voor 140.000 euro geveild
