This haunting memorial is found in Budapest, Hungary. It is called 'Shoes on the Danube Bank'. Conceived of by film director Can Togay and created in conjunction with sculptor Gyula Pauer, it commemorates and honour the memories of the Jews and others who were massacred by fascist Hungarian militia during the Second World War. Men, women, and children were told to take off their shoes, which were valuable and could be resold by the militia afterwards, whereupon the people were shot at the edge of the water so their bodies fell into the water and were carried away. These represent the shoes that were all that were left of the lives lost. 60 pairs of period shoes made of iron are attached to the ground. Sometimes you will see pebbles or stones stacked atop the shoes. This is not part of the sculpture. It is an act of grief often found in Jewish cemeteries.
Most of the shootings took place in a period of only a month, between December 1944 and January 1945. During that time the Arrow Cross Party police also took as many as a further 20,000 Jews from the Budapest ghetto and executed them along the river bank.
These acts were not carried out by hard-core German Nazis. They were radicalised Hungarians in a society already inured to the ideas of anti-Semitism. Pogroms were popular in Eastern Europe. And Hungary had been part of an empire cut up like a steak after WWI by the victors. There was the same resentment and feeling of powerlessness there for the taking as in Germany, and Jews were a historically convenient scapegoat because they were different
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