In Budapest, I went to see the shoe memorial. Not knowing all the details of its history, I had only heard that it was an independent art installation to honor the victims of WWII. It was a bone chilling December evening in Budapest as I made my way through the Pest side of the city to the banks of the Danube where the memorial is located, close to the buildings of Hungary’s Parliament. Shoes on the Danube Promenade was created by film director Can Togay and sculptor Gyula Pauer and consists of 60 pairs of 1940s-style shoes, true to size and detail and wear, and sculpted from iron. The shoes (men’s, women’s, and children’s) are lined up with toes towards the river, and look exactly as if they were just removed by their owners and discarded, mysteriously, so that one’s eyes are sent on a search from their insoles to the river’s water, and onward.
I was so struck by the solemn simplicity of the installation that even now, two months later, I struggle to find a single string of words that does any justice to what I felt as I stood there, riveted, with tears streaming into my collar. I attempted, and failed, to write this article several times, abandoning it for fear I could never do in words what the shoe memorial does in visuals and after reading half a dozen poorly-written accounts of it on the internet, I wondered if there is anybody out there that has succeeded in doing this at all. But then, there is the history involved… and all that it demands of the conscientious onlooker, for I do not believe that one could adequately comprehend the shoe memorial without contemplating the consequences of man against mankind.
The winter of 1944-45 was one of the coldest on record in Hungary. Boulders of ice floated down the Danube river that runs through the center of Budapest, dividing the city into two. In October of 1944, Hitler’s army overthrew the Hungarian government and its leader, Miklos Horthy, who was replaced by the fascist anti-semitic Ferenc Szalasi. Having the same ideologies as Hitler himself, Szalasi quickly established the Arrow Cross Party to publicly terrorize and murder Budapest’s Jews. In just one year, approximately 80,000 Hungarian Jews were sent on a death march to Austria, and 20,000 were executed on the banks of the Danube, along with anybody suspected of collaboration. That winter, the Danube became known as the “Jewish Cemetery.”
Shoes were a valuable commodity during the war. And as the victims of executions would no longer be needing theirs, they were required to remove them at the banks of the river. The shoe strings were pulled out and used to tie their hands and feet. Often, two or three people would be tied together, but only one person out of the group would be shot. When they were thrown into the river this way, the weight of the dead person would drown the others beneath the icy water. Later, their shoes would be sold on the black market, or taken directly for use by the Arrow Cross militiamen.
Just sixty years later, Togay and Pauer’s Shoes on the Danube Promenade was installed, with three iron plaques on which the following is written in Hungarian, English, and Hebrew: “To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-45. Erected 16 April 2005.” Indeed, to see the shoe memorial is to imagine, in real time, the men, women, and children who were marched at gunpoint and plunged there, barefoot, to watery graves. And to wonder, perhaps more so, about the people who watched it happening, again and again, from inside their warm homes high above the streets. And I write just 60 years later because when I stood on the banks of the Danube and looked upon the row of remarkably lifelike iron shoes, some of them so, so small, I felt a queasy unease that still lingers in my soul. For there is more than one way to throw your neighbor into a river… and it’s not always the first way that you think. I would sooner drown alongside a good neighbor than turn my back on his demise in the streets.
Reference:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/hu-history-30.htm
