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 traditional statement from the Haggadah, “in each and every generation a person is obligated to see themself as though they came out of Egypt,” is a very important one. In the Hebrew letter “bet” that begins and surrounds the statement, the bottom depicts a Nazi extermination camp, with barbed-wire fence, guard tower, and the flames and smoke of crematoria. At the top, by contrast, we see an image of a peaceful Egypt, here represented as a land of the rising sun. What is the meaning of this contrast? Are we to conclude that compared with the Holocaust, Egypt seems like paradise?