The harrowing and movin

Self-porttait by Miklos Adler

Just as Seder night is different from all other nights, so was the Holocaust Haggadah created by survivors for survivors seventy-five years ago for Passover 1946.

“Haggadah” means “retelling”. On this occasion, that reflected the gruesome modern-day reality of having been “slaves” to Hitler.

The radical, manmade A Survivors’ Haggadah was written in Hebrew and Yiddish by Yosef Sheinson, a Lithuanian Hebrew teacher and survivor of the Kovno Ghetto. Accompanying the book were seven haunting woodcuts of the War, illustrated by Hungarian artist and Theresienstadt survivor Miklos Adler.

One brutal illustration corresponds with the wellknown sentence “for not only one has risen against us to destroy us.” It depicted a soldier shooting several prisoners. In the final woodcut, smoke is seen curling up from tall chimneys, becoming the disembodied heads of an old couple and a child. At the top of the picture are the words: “Go forth to the Land”. The caption below

“Therefore we are obligated…”

in Hebrew states, “therefore we are obligated”.

One explanation is that this image presents God’s instructions to Abraham in Genesis. It suggests that the survivors’ duty, destiny and hope is in the Land of Israel.

The seven woodcuts in the Haggadah

are part of a greater series that were produced by Miklos Adler, an accomplished artist.

After being liberated from Theresienstadt, the thirty-six year-old had just one mission: to show the world what the Nazis and their collaborators did to the Jews.