A MEMORIAL
The Shoes on the Danube: A Memorial
On the Pest embankment near the Parliament, sixty pairs of iron shoes mark one of the darkest episodes of the war. What they mean, and how to regard them.
Check dates and availability ↗What you pass on the Pest embankment
A little south of the Parliament, at the very edge of the stone embankment on the Pest side, you may notice a low, quiet installation right at the waterline: rows of shoes, cast in iron, arranged as if their owners had just stepped out of them. There are sixty pairs in all, men's, women's and children's, worked in the styles of the 1940s and left scattered along a forty-metre stretch of the bank. From a passing boat they are easy to miss among the grander sights, but they mark one of the most terrible episodes in the city's history, and it is worth knowing what they are for. This is not a decorative riverside sculpture. It is a Holocaust memorial, and it stands exactly where the events it remembers took place.
What happened here
In the winter of 1944 and early 1945, Budapest's Jews were being persecuted and murdered by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist party then in power. Among the killings, militiamen brought groups of Jewish men, women and children to the edge of the Danube, ordered them to remove their shoes, and shot them so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. Shoes were valuable, and the victims were made to leave them behind at the water's edge. Thousands of people are believed to have been killed along the Danube in the city during those months. The memorial marks this stretch of embankment as the actual place where such shootings happened, which is what gives the empty shoes their unbearable weight.
The memorial itself
The work was created by the sculptor Gyula Pauer, from a concept by the film director Can Togay, and it was unveiled on the Pest embankment in 2005. The sixty pairs of period shoes are cast in iron and fixed to the stone, deliberately plain and true to life rather than idealised, so that the absence of the people who wore them is the whole point. Set into the stone behind the shoes are cast-iron benches and signs bearing an inscription in Hungarian, English and Hebrew, dedicating the memorial to the victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944 and 1945. Visitors often leave small stones, candles and flowers among the shoes, in the Jewish tradition of remembrance, so the memorial is rarely without some quiet offering.
Seeing it from the water, and on foot
From a cruise you will glimpse the memorial only briefly and from a distance, as a dark line of shapes at the base of the embankment near the Parliament, and in the dark it is easy to pass without noticing. That is reason enough to visit it properly on foot, in daylight, when you can walk the row slowly and read the inscriptions. It sits on the Pest promenade between the Parliament and the Chain Bridge, an easy and free walk, and it takes only a few minutes to see but rewards a longer, quieter pause. If your cruise has pointed it out, going back on land to stand with it is the right way to give the place the attention it asks for.
A note on how to regard it
A dinner cruise is, rightly, a celebratory evening, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying the floodlit city. But the same riverbank that carries the lights also carries this memory, and a good guide does not hide that. The Shoes on the Danube ask for a moment of stillness rather than a photograph taken in passing, and knowing they are there deepens rather than spoils an evening on the water. If you are travelling with children old enough to understand, a short, honest word about what the shoes mean can be part of what makes Budapest more than a skyline. The river has been beautiful and terrible in the same century, and holding both is part of seeing the city truthfully.