A handwritten poem by Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who kept a diary of two years spent in hiding from the Nazis, has sold at auction for €140,000 ($148,000; £120,000).
Anne sent the eight-line verse to a friend in 1942.
The auction house in the Netherlands had valued the rare, handwritten note at €30,000-€50,000.
Anne is best remembered for her diaries of life as a German-born Jew in occupied Amsterdam in World War Two.
The text in Dutch was dated 28 March 1942, three months before Anne and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam.
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.”
About 20 collectors were present in the sales room at the auction house, with others bidding by telephone and online. The reserve price was set at €30,000.
Anne was born in Frankfurt in 1929, four years before Hitler came to power in Germany. With the rise of the Nazis, her family fled to Amsterdam, where her father Otto established a business and Anne and Margot attended school.
But the family came under threat again when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940. Jews faced curfews, were forbidden from owning a business and were forced to wear a yellow star. Children could only attend Jewish schools.
In July 1942, Margot was ordered to report for relocation to a work camp, forcing the family into hiding in a secret annexe above the offices of Otto’s business, ownership of which he had transferred to a friend.
The second four carried on the same edifying theme, but may be Anne’s original work.
The auctioneers noted that Anne switched her style of handwriting midway through writing.
Her diaries have become one the most important documents to emerge from the Holocaust. Her father published them after she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi death camp aged 15.
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