Shoes on the Danube Promenade

During the Second World War, Hungary was on the arrow cross government, a very dark period for the country. On the 19th of March 1944, Germany invaded the country and implemented the Nazi government. Then Hungary worked actively for the Shoah. In August, the royal Hungarian Prime Minister (Miklós Horthy) resumes the government. In September the Red Army envied the Hungarian soil in order to hunt Germans. On the 15^th of October, a German commando kidnapped Horthy's son and then he was forced to give back the power to Germans.

arrow cross government's flag (wikipedia)

  On the front of the parliament, we can see 60 pairs of metal shoes set in the concrete of the Danube promenade. It’s a memorial for tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who were lined up, shot and thrown into the Danube during the arrow cross. As we can see in war movies, before killing Jewish, the Nazis liked to humiliate them and for that, they undressed them. The only valuable thing they wore was their shoes. That’s why Gyula Pauer, Hungarian sculptor, and his friend Can Togay chose shoes as a symbol to build this sculpture in the year 2005. This is a very strong symbol to never forget what happened there.

It must be remembered that about a third of the 250,000 Jews of Budapest residents died in the Nazi genocide during the German occupation of 1944. In 1945, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported while Germany had lost the war.

 These shoes send shivers up your spine! When we look at them, I seem to hear the screams of the innocent victims.