A handwritten poem by Anne Frank has sold at auction for £119,000 - more than four times its reserve price.

The sale, to an unnamed online bidder, took just two minutes at Bubb Kuyper auction house in the Dutch city of Haarlem.

“Over the last 40 years, only four or five documents signed by the teenager have gone under the hammer,” Thijs Blankevoort, the auction house’s co-director, said.

The poem, which is dated March 28, 1942, is being auctioned at the Bubb Kuyper auction house in the western Dutch town of Haarlem and is expected to sell for around £45,000.

It is only the fourth time any item in the young diarist’s handwriting has gone up for sale - prompting the expected substantial selling price.

The eight-line poem was written by the teenage Holocaust diarist three months before the family went into hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic when Anne was 12 years old.

The poem is written in Dutch in black ink on a piece of white paper that has yellowed with age. It is dedicated to “Cri-cri”, the sister of Anne Frank’s primary school friend, Jacqueline van Maarsen, and is advice from one girl to another.

Christiane ‘Cri-cri’ Van Maarsen, who died ten years ago, was the older sister of Jacqueline.

Explaining her decision to put the letter up for auction, Jacqueline writes: “My sister (nicknamed Cri-cri) tore this page out of her poezie album and gave it to me around 1970. I know that my sister was not as attached to this verse from Anne to her as I am to the verse Anne addressed to me, and that is the reason that I am now putting it up for sale.”

Anne’s eight lines of poetry are titled ‘Beste Cri-Cri’ and signed ‘Ter herinnering aan Anne Frank’ – which loosely translates ‘In memory of Anne Frank’.

Her words are explained by the Dutch auction house as being “a typically edifying poem of the sort that was often written in poezie albums, exhorting the owner to do her best and be diligent at work, so that anyone who reproves her is answered in an honourable manner”.

Anne and her family would enter into hiding in the famed annexe of Otto Frank’s Amsterdam office, where they would remain until 1944 - after which the family was arrested and taken to Auschwitz.

She died age 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945, two months before the camp’s liberation on April 15.

A spokesperson for Bubb Kuyper confirmed Anne Frank’s letter was amongst 250 items being put up for sale by the auction house today.