Ng story of the 1946 survivors’ Haggadah
“For not only one has risen against us to destroy us”
As soon as he returned to his home town of Debrecen, Adler created sixteen woodcuts, which were printed as a limited edition of five hundred immediately after the War. They were signed Ben Binyamin, in honour of his father.
Adler, who died in Israel in 1965, did
“For Pharaoh only made decrees against the males, and Laban wished to uproot everything”
not know that his art had made its way into the 1946 Haggadah, according to his sister
Eva Klein, who now lives in London.
In an extraordinary twist, the Haggadah was discovered fifty years later by an American
law professor, Saul Touster, while going through his father’s files. The unlikely publisher of the copy in his possession was the occupying American Third Army. It had been put together
by army chaplain Rabbi Abraham Klausner for a Seder held for survivors and liberators in Munich’s Deutsches Theatre restaurant, which was once frequented by Nazi grandees.
It was only when Touster, who was also an active poet and writer, approached Eva that she learned of her brother’s work with the unique, 1946 Haggadah.
In 2000, Touster edited and wrote the forward for a reprint of the 1946 Haggadah. Additionally, he put together a limited edition book of Adler’s woodcuts, Beyond Words: A Holocaust history in sixteen woodcuts done in 1945 by Miklos Adler, a Hungarian survivor.
Eva, 91, a Jewish Care resident, hopes this Passover will mark a new beginning of freedom for the world from Covid-19. Nevertheless, her thoughts are never far away from the horrors she witnessed eight decades ago and her mission to pay homage to the work of her brother. She says that before Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah film and Anne Frank’s writings, her brother Miklos Adler was the first to show the world what happened.
‘’My means, I know, are modest and old-fashioned; my style, I know, is poor,” Adler wrote about his work. “And yet I feel that I, too, must tell what follows in these pages. Oh, my murdered brothers and sisters, you who sanctified God’s name! I will mourn you until I die.’’