Anne Frank’s ’37 holiday card turns up in shop

updated 7:11 p.m. ET April 24, 2008

An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of the card's recipient. Her name was Sanne Ledermann, according to the Anne Frank Museum.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A Dutch school director preparing an exhibition on Anne Frank has found a holiday postcard signed by the Jewish teenage diarist, a museum said Wednesday.

The card, sent in 1937, was addressed to one of Frank's best friends, Sanne Ledermann, and postmarked from just across the Dutch border in Aachen, Germany, said Maatje Mostard, of the Anne Frank Museum.

Decorated with a clover-covered bell atop a snowy field and wishing "good luck for the new year" in German, the card was signed "Anne Frank" with no other handwritten message.

Mostard said the museum has seen another such card, mailed the same day from the same town, where the 8-year-old Frank was visiting her grandmother. "We know it's an original," she said.

The teacher, Paul van den Heuvel, found the winter greeting card while gathering material on Anne Frank for his school. He came across it in a box of cards in his father's antique store in the town of Naarden.

The museum was informed of the find by a journalist Tuesday.

"I don't know what he will do with it. We hope we can get it for our collection," Mostard said.

The museum, which encompasses the small Amsterdam apartment where the Frank family hid from the Nazis for 25 months, has the largest collection of documents and papers on Anne, whose diary is the most widely read book relating to the Holocaust.

Anne, her parents and sister and four other Jews hiding there were arrested in August 1944 and deported to Auschwitz. The sisters were later sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne died of typhus in March 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. She was 15.

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