Auctioneers at Bubb Kuyper, in the Dutch town of Haarlem, had only expected the poem to fetch around 50,000 euros (£42,000). 
 
 Instead, it was snapped up by an anonymous bidder for 140,000 euros (£119,000), placing it among the most lucrative of Anne's possessions ever to be sold at auction. 
 
 The copy of the poem was penned just two days before Jews in Germany were ordered to start wearing a Star of David on their clothes in what marked the beginning of the Holocaust. 
 
 The text for Christiane, who is addressed by her nickname "Cri Cri" in the message, was put up for auction by her sister, Jacqueline. 
 
 "There is not much material out there any more in terms of Anne Frank memorabilia, much of it has been put into private collections or is already in a museum," Thijs Blankevoort, the owner of Bubb Kuyper, told The Telegraph. 
 
 "So this was a very rare opportunity for someone to get their hands on an item of this sort. 
 
 "What is really significant about it is that it was written before Anne Frank was sent to a concentration camp. The poem itself is just a children's poem; in itself its historical significance is fairly limited." ||||| Margot Frank receives a call-up notice from the Nazis to return to Germany to work in a labour camp. The next day, the Frank family go into hiding in the Secret Annex above Otto's offices. They are joined by the Van Pels family one week later (Anne gave the Van Pels family the pseudonym Van Daan in her diary). ||||| Addressed to “Dear Cri-cri,” the poem is signed by Anne and dated March 28, 1942, nearly four months before her family went into hiding in an annex of rooms above the Amsterdam office of her father, Otto Frank. It was there that she wrote her famous diary, which was published in 1947 and transformed her into an emblem of lost innocence. 
 
 In a phone interview from Amsterdam on Wednesday, Jacqueline van Maarsen, 87, said that she had decided to part with the poem in part because her sister had spurned it. She stressed, however, that she treasured the notes and verse that Anne had written to her. 
 
 “My sister didn’t really like the poem very much because Anne was very critical of her, because she left school early, whereas Anne was busy all the time,” she said. “She gave it to me because she knew I was collecting Anne’s things. I would never sell the verse that Anne addressed to me. But as my sister was not attached to hers, I decided to sell it.” 
 
 Thys Blankevoort, co-director of Bubb Kuyper, the auction house that sold the poem, said the price was nearly five times the minimum price of $32,000. He said the successful bidder wished to remain anonymous. 
 
 Mr. Blankevoort said that autographed works by Anne Frank were extremely rare and that only four or five had been discovered in the past four decades. He said the auction had generated strong interest, including inquiries from as far away as Fiji and Japan. 
 
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 “The bid was much higher than I expected and shows Anne Frank’s cultural importance and also the emotional attachment to who she was and what she represents,” he said. “Any item by Anne Frank is very important, as there is not much left. When the Nazis broke down doors, they put everything on the street, where it could be destroyed by the rain or stolen.” 
 
 After two years of hiding from the Nazis in the annex, the Frank family was discovered in August 1944 and deported. Everyone died, except for Mr. Frank. Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in the first few months of 1945. She was 15. Her “Diary of a Young Girl” has been translated into 67 languages and has sold 30 million copies. 
 
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 Mr. Blankevoort noted that the “friendship books” that circulated in the Netherlands in the 1940s were the social media of their time, and that the sentiments expressed by Anne to Christiane were particularly notable because they were written before Anne was confined, emotionally and physically, by the attic walls that would soon curtail her activities. 
 
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 “In our mind, she is the girl who never left the attic,” he said. “But here she is free, with her spirit free.” 
 
 In the spring, a Massachusetts museum paid $50,000 for a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales in which Anne had inscribed her name and the name of her sister, Margot. In 1989, another short piece of verse written in a friend’s notebook went on sale at Christie’s. 
 
 The Anne Frank House, the popular four-story museum in Amsterdam on the Prinsengracht canal where the Frank family hid during the war, decided not to bid on the latest document for sale. 
 
 Maatje Mostart, a spokeswoman for the museum, noted that the poem was addressed to the sister of a friend and, as such, did not shed deep light on Anne’s own story. 
 
 “It’s, of course, very special that part of an Anne Frank collection comes out after so many years,” Ms. Mostart said. “As we have other original manuscripts directly connected to her life, for us this is less important.” 
 
 Jacqueline van Maarsen, whose father was Jewish, survived the Nazi occupation because her mother, who was born Catholic, had registered her as a Christian. The father survived the Holocaust, but his relatives died. She has written a memoir, “Your Best Friend, Anne Frank,” which she said was how Anne signed a farewell letter to her before she went into hiding. 
 
 Ms. van Maarsen said the two had enjoyed playing Monopoly and chatting about Hollywood stars. She said her friend would have “loved the interest around the world” that her writing had inspired. 
 
 “People say her diary was very well written, and I think her work remains powerful so many decades later because of her intelligence and her character,” she said, adding, “To me, she was just my little friend, and I miss her very much.”
– The Netherlands' Bubb Kuyper auction house expected the eight-line poem on a piece of old paper to sell for thousands. They just didn't expect to go for $148,000. For that price, an anonymous bidder has become the owner of a poem signed by Anne Frank on March 28, 1942, reports the BBC; her family was forced into hiding in Amsterdam on July 6 of that year. The poem was initially sent to the older sister of one of Anne's friends, Jacqueline van Maarsen. However, van Maarsen says her sister, who died in 2006, gave it to her around 1970. According to the auction website, van Maarsen decided to sell the poem because "I know that my sister was not as attached to this verse." Indeed, she found it to have a "condescending tone," in the words of the New York Times. "My sister didn't really like the poem very much because Anne was very critical of her, because she left school early, whereas Anne was busy all the time," van Maarsen says. The first four lines of the poem—instructing Christiane van Maarsen to "once again take up your task" in times of failure "and try harder than before"—were copied from a magazine, but the last four lines may be of Anne's own creation. They read in part, "If others have reproached you … then be sure to amend your mistake," per CNN, which has a complete translation. The poem was expected to fetch as much as $52,000, but Bubb Kuyper's owner notes that while "in itself its historical significance is fairly limited ... there is not much material out there anymore in terms of Anne Frank memorabilia," per the Telegraph. (Anne Frank's marbles were found in 2014.)