Shoes on the Danube Bank

Sixty pairs of iron shoes sit on the stone embankment of the Danube, about 300 metres south of Parliament. There are men's shoes, women's shoes, and children's shoes, all cast in the style of the 1940s. They are rusted and weathered. Candles and flowers appear in them regularly. It is one of the most quietly devastating memorials in Europe, and it demands almost nothing of you except that you stand there and understand what happened.

Between December 1944 and January 1945, members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party — the fascist militia that seized power with Nazi backing — marched thousands of Jews from the Budapest ghetto to the banks of the Danube. They ordered their victims to remove their shoes, because shoes were valuable and could be resold. Then they shot them at the water's edge so the bodies would fall into the river and be carried away. An estimated 3,500 people were killed along the riverbank, part of a broader campaign that murdered roughly 20,000 Budapest Jews in just a few months.

The memorial was conceived by Hungarian film director Can Togay and created with sculptor Gyula Pauer. It was erected on April 16, 2005, sixty years after the massacres. Behind the shoes runs a 40-metre stone bench at about knee height. There are no walls, no barriers, no interpretive centre — just shoes, the river, and the weight of what they represent.

The memorial works because of its restraint. The shoes are life-sized and specific: a pair of heels, work boots, a child's lace-ups. They make the abstract concrete. People were standing here. People who had dressed that morning not knowing it was their last.