THE BUDAPEST SHOE MEMORIAL (THIRD RIVER CRUISE MISSIVE)

“… I heard a series of popping sounds. Thinking the Russians had arrived, I slunk to the window. But what I saw was worse than anything I had seen before, worse than the most frightening accounts I had ever witnessed. Two Arrow Cross men were standing on the embankment of the river, aiming at and shooting a group of men, women and children into the Danube—one after the other, on their coats the Yellow Star. I looked at the Danube. It was neither blue nor gray but red. With a throbbing heart, I ran back to the room in the middle of the apartment and sat on the floor, gasping for air.”

                                  Zsuzsanna Ozsváth,    

                                  Eyewitness to the massacre[1]

Why can human beings be so incredibly cruel to other human beings?

What spirit takes over the thinking processes of otherwise normal people?

And in what circumstances?

I asked myself those questions—again—as I gazed at a sobering, thought-provoking monument and memorial on the Danube River in Budapest known as “The Shoes on the Danube Promenade.” The memorial was a short walk along the riverbank—near the impressive Hungarian Parliament building—close to where our river cruise boat (the Viking Lofn) was docked.

The memorial itself consists of sixty pairs of old-fashioned shoes—the type worn in the 1940s—sitting at the edge of the waterfront, scattered and abandoned as though their owners had just stepped out of them. If you bend over and look closely, you see that the now-rusted shoes, made of iron and set into the concrete, is covered with various flowers and candles left by visitors. The monument, installed on the Pest bank of the Danube in 2005, was the brainchild of film director Can Togay (who used actual film footage of the massacre to position the shoes) and sculptor Gyula Pauer. At three separate locations near the memorial are cast iron signs in Hungarian, English and Hebrew reading: “To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-1945.”

“Sigh.”

As one commentator notes: “Each of the shoes is different: some have worn-down heels, others have shabby uppers; some have laces, others have straps left open, some are classic women’s pumps, others are workmen’s boots; some are standing straight up, while others have fallen over, as though they were hastily taken off. And then there are the tiny shoes of the children.”[2]

The variety of shoes add to the solemness (and effectiveness) of the memorial. Who were these victims and why did they have to die? 

What happened here? In the dark winter of 1944-1945, as the war and the Nazi nightmare was drawing to a close, the Germans toppled the government of Miklos Horthy (their wartime ally), occupied the country, and installed the fascist, violently antisemitic Ferenc Szálasi as the head of state. Szálasi, in turn, headed the Arrow Cross (Nylas) fascist party, dedicated to an extreme nationalist, anti-Communist, anti-capitalism, and virulently antisemitic ideology. Under the Arrow Cross, Jews were again deported (80,000 Jews were expelled and led on a death march to the Austrian border) and, in Budapest itself a reign of terror was instituted with thousands of Jews murdered.

Why at the Danube? The river was a convenient place to shoot the Jews because the river would carry the bodies away. Sometimes the shoelaces were removed and used to tie the hands of the victims, or string them together so those not shot would be drowned. Those who survived and floated in the water were used as target practice. Most, especially the young children, would die immediately in the river water because it was so cold. In fact, so many were killed in the cold winter of 1944-1945, that the Danube became known as the “Jewish Cemetery.”[3]

The memorial is a sobering reminder of these many acts of cruelty.

I have been to other places where I tried to mentally confront this type of evil. Several years ago, I accompanied a group that visited the Normandy beach landing sites, Bastogne and Battle of the Bulge sites, and the American cemeteries in Belgium and Luxembourg. At that time, one of our stops was the site of the so-called Wereth 11 massacre. At that spot—in a cow pasture some two hours from Brussels by car and near the village of Wereth—is a simple stone monument dedicated to the slaughter and torture of eleven black soldiers fleeing the SS during the early days of the Battle of the Bulge. Two of the members of our group had a personal connection to one of the young men who had been killed. I was asked to say a few words at the gravesite. As I recall, I acknowledged during my prayer my lack of understanding how evil works, and the reason why humans can be so cruel and inhumane to others.

I still stumble to understand that dynamic in this world or any other.

I felt almost exactly the same when—many years ago—I visited the Nazi-era Dachau death camp on the outskirts of Munich.

There is an adversary of our souls that is out to kill, steal and destroy …

But, thank God, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the light. And in the end, good will overwhelm evil and darkness.

That is the hope I cling to …

[1] Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, “From Country to Country: My Search for Home,” in Alvin Rosenfeld, ed., The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 185-186.

[2] For an excellent overview of the monument and the history behind it, see Sheryl Silver Ochayon, “The Shoes on the  Danube Promenade—Commemoration of the Tragedy,” Yad Vashem.

[3] Ochayon, “The Shoes on the Danube Promenade.”