 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 well-known 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 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.

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 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 50 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,says it is 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.’’