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.”
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