8 Lines Written by Anne Frank Fetch $148,000 at Auction:

By Dan Bilefsky.

New York Times.

November 23, 2016.

In 1970, a Dutch woman named Christiane van Maarsen took out a notebook from her childhood. She tore out a page with an eight-line poem that her little sister’s best friend had written decades earlier. The friend’s condescending tone had long rubbed her the wrong way.

The friend was Anne Frank.

The opening lines of the poem, written in a “poezie album,” or friendship book, sought to motivate Christiane, whom Anne regarded as somewhat idle. They are traditional lines of encouragement that might have come from a 1930s Dutch periodical.

The closing verses — which may be Anne’s own — say:

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.

Ms. van Maarsen, who died in 2006, gave the poem to her sister, Jacqueline, Anne’s best friend, for safekeeping, and she kept it for decades.

On Wednesday, the autographed poem fetched about $148,000 at an auction in the Dutch city of Haarlem, a price that reflected the profound resonance Anne Frank continues to have in global popular culture, seven decades after she perished in the Holocaust.

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.

The short handwritten poem by Anne Frank, before it was auctioned on Wednesday in Haarlem, in the Netherlands. Credit Peter Dejong/Associated Press

“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.

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.

“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.”