I might have walked by it the last time I was here but it's something that can be overlooked if seen only from a distance. This simple monument created by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay consists of dozens of pairs of shoes cast in iron. It represents one of the blackest episodes in the history of Budapest.
In WWII, Hungary's policies regarding the Jews varied from those of Nazi Germany. Jews in Budapest were oppressed and their liberties limited, but despite the anti-semitic views of regent Miklós Horthy, the situation there was generally better for the Jewish population than it was in Nazi-occupied territory for the first years of the war.
This changed in March 1944, when the Hungarian government collapsed and the country was occupied by the Germans. Jews were immediately stripped of all civil rights and forced to wear the sarga csillag. In the fall, Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szalási was propped up by the Nazis as Prime Minister. Under his watch, rabid Arrow Cross militiamen were taken off their flimsy leashes and began killing Jews at will.
Between November 1944 and January 1945, over 20,000 Jews were rounded up and taken to the banks of the Danube for extermination. Usually they were simply shot and left to fall into the river. However, the European winter was especially savage in 1944-5; if the Danube had frozen over, holes were cut into the ice and the victims pushed through. To save time, effort and ammunition, the always-efficient fascists would at times tie 5 people together and only shoot one - the weight of the dead companion would drag the others to the bottom while still alive.
And so it was here, facing the western bank of the city that their grandparents had a major part in building, under the apartment windows of the city fathers that their parents helped to enrich, and in the shadow of the Parliament building where their elected officials defined the rule of Hungarian law, that these innocent Budapesti were murdered by a ragtag band of fascists playing their last hand.
Before they were executed, they were told by their Arrow Cross ("Nyilaskereszt") assassins to take off their shoes, a valuable commodity in wartime. The shoes were picked over first by their assassins, then, one would assume, were either collected by some government resources agency or simply left there for human vultures to fight over.
The Shoes on the Danube Promenade
Lonely Planet info about the Memorial
