This small book, often called “The Survivor’s Haggadah,” is not a Haggadah proper. Rather, it is a Passover service created for a gathering of Jewish U.S. servicemen and survivors in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Composed and designed by Yosef Sheinson, a survivor of Dachau, it includes elements of the traditional Passover Haggadah, mostly modified, but it also includes new poems and readings (some in Yiddish), along with haunting prints by Miklos Adler. Both the text and the artwork of the book echo the questions that those gathering in Munich must have had, connecting the recent horror with themes of past oppression of Jews. No participant could have been unmoved ty the service. 

This page, containing the first of the book’s haunting woodcuts, might seem, at first glance, to depict the splitting of the Red Sea. But the image is labelled at the bottom with the formula, “we were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt,” and the sides of the ditch (now clearly seen as a ditch) are modern slave-workers, under the supervision of a soldier with a rifle, and not Jews in Egypt. If these are Jews laboring for the Nazi’s, then it is likely that the ditch is for the bodies of Jews who have been—or will be—murdered.