Stretching along the western bank of the Danube, just north of the Chain Bridge, the Shoes on the Danube Bank is one of the most quietly devastating memorials you will encounter anywhere in Europe. Sixty pairs of period-accurate iron shoes — men's dress shoes, women's heels, small children's boots — are fixed to the stone embankment, pointing toward the water as if their owners had just stepped out of them. They were installed in 2005 by filmmaker Can Togay and sculptor Gyula Pauer to honour the thousands of Jewish men, women, and children shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen during the winter of 1944–45. Victims were ordered to remove their shoes before being killed — shoes being valuable wartime commodities — and their bodies were carried downstream by the current. The memorial makes that horror concrete and inescapable without resorting to grandeur or spectacle.
Monument