It’s one of the world’s saddest sights – a jumble of shoes scattered along the Danube riverfront in Hungary’s capital Budapest.
They come in all shapes and sizes, from workers’ boots to smart businessmen’s shoes, from dainty court high heels to a pair of children’s tiny lace-ups.
These 60 pairs of cast-iron shoes are the powerful memorial to one of the most despicable events of Word War II, when members of the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross Party ordered a group of their Jewish countrymen to take off their shoes before shooting them dead, leaving their bodies to crumple into the river.
But while it’s heart-rending to ponder the fate of the more than 100,000 Hungarian Jews who perished in the Holocaust – more than half of the Jewish population of Budapest – via the many remarkable memorials that dot the city, it can still be an incredibly inspiring experience.
No one who sees those shoes will ever forget the horror of what happened, but they’ll also never doubt Hungarians’ determination to bare their hearts and souls to the world, in the hope of such hurt never happening again.
For there are also so many stories of individual heroism during such a dark time in history that are celebrated in one of Europe’s most stunning cities, and which can make a visit an incredibly enriching experience.
Read the article by Sue Williams in The Canberra Times.