The Shoes on the Danube Bank: what do they remember?

Where are the shoes on the Danube?

They're on the Pest embankment, just south of Parliament, right on the edge of the stone above the water. They're made of iron and they've rusted. Men's boots, women's shoes and small ones, children's, all in the style of the period. Some still stand upright. Others have toppled over, as though someone had pulled them off in a hurry. No two are the same, and each keeps the shape of the foot that wore it.

At three places along the memorial there are cast-iron plaques in three languages: Hungarian, English and Hebrew. The English one reads: "To the memory of victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944–45." Now and then there's a candle or a handful of flowers inside one of the shoes. Nobody organises it. People passing by leave them.

Who made the memorial, and when?

The idea came from a film-maker, Can Togay, who created the memorial together with the sculptor Gyula Pauer. It was installed in 2005. The news report that announced the project, a few months earlier, added a detail that's often forgotten: it doesn't only remember the Jews who were murdered, but also the non-Jewish victims who had hidden them.

What happened on this riverbank?

To understand who was doing the shooting, you need to go back a few months. In March 1944, German troops occupied Hungary, until then Germany's ally in the war. That autumn, the Regent, Miklós Horthy, attempted the near impossible: to take the country out of the war.

In the small hours of 8 October, the Gestapo kidnapped General Szilárd Bakay on the Danube promenade. He was Budapest's military commander and the officer picked to organise the exit from the war. Many believe that's where it all began to go wrong. The attempt failed. The Germans toppled Horthy's government and brought Ferenc Szálasi and his party to power: the Arrow Cross, fascist and violently antisemitic. That was on 16 October.

Its militiamen hunted Jews across the whole city. At the end of November a ghetto was decreed in the Jewish quarter, and it was sealed on 10 December. And again and again that winter, the militiamen marched groups of people down to the river.

Why shoes?

The answer is a practical one, and that makes it harder to hear. Shoes were loot: in wartime, a sound pair was something to wear or to sell. Many victims were ordered to take theirs off before the militiamen opened fire, and some had to leave whatever valuables they still had inside them. The Danube took the bodies. The shoes stayed on the bank.

A historian of the Holocaust in Hungary, Randolph L. Braham, describes something colder still: three people would be tied together and lined up on the edge of the embankment, and only the one in the middle was shot. The weight of that body dragged the other two into the water.

Some people saw it from very close by. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth was a Jewish girl in Budapest at the time, and she survived thanks to her nanny, Erzsi Fajó, who saved her. From a window, she watched two militiamen on the embankment shooting at a group of men, women and children, all wearing the yellow star. Decades later she wrote it down. When she looked at the river, she recalled, it wasn't blue or grey. It was red.

How many people died?

Nobody knows. Memorial institutions speak of hundreds of people shot on this stretch of the river and thousands of Jews murdered across the whole of Budapest. Some people quote exact figures, but none of them rests on a source anyone can check.

Nor is it true that the shoes mark the spot of a single massacre. They remember killings that happened again and again along the bank throughout that winter. The memorial carries no names and no numbers. It carries shoes, all different, one for each person.

Visiting the memorial

The memorial sits on the edge of the embankment, between the water and a busy road. It's meant to be seen from the promenade: don't step onto it or stand among the shoes. Across the road, a little further north, rises Parliament. Take all the time you need.

Fact or legend?

• Fact: in the winter of 1944–45, Arrow Cross militiamen murdered Budapest Jews on the banks of the Danube, and they often made them take off their shoes, which were worth money. The memorial dates from 2005: Can Togay's idea, made with the sculptor Gyula Pauer.
• History and testimony: the method of tying three people together is described by the historian Randolph L. Braham, quoted by János Pelle; the red river comes from Zsuzsanna Ozsváth's written memories.
• Myth or unproven: any exact number of victims on this bank, and the idea that the shoes mark the site of one single massacre. Sources speak of hundreds on this bank and thousands across Budapest; the exact number isn't known.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story at the first stop, "The Shoes", on the route "From Parliament to the Glass House". You listen to it from the promenade beside the memorial. The same walk ends at the Glass House, where a great many people took refuge in 1944: that's the stop "A House with Four Levels". General Bakay's kidnapping is at "A General Abducted at Dawn", on Budapest's free route, "Along the Danube, from Bridge to Bridge", further south along the same bank.

If you're planning your trip, our Budapest guide has the practical side.

Further reading

• Yad Vashem, "Shoes on the Danube Promenade": https://yadvashem.org/articles/general/shoes-on-the-danube-promenade
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Aftermath of a shooting along the banks of the Danube River", photo record in the Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/aftermath-of-a-shooting-along-the-banks-of-the-danube-river
• Pelle János, "A nyilas terror Budán", Valóság 58 (2015/10), pp. 65–87 (in Hungarian): https://epa.oszk.hu/02900/02924/00034/pdf/EPA02924_valosag_2015_10_065-087.pdf
• Történelemtanárok Egylete, "Elárvult cipők a pesti Duna-parton" (2004, in Hungarian): https://tte.hu/elarvult-cipok-a-pesti-duna-parton
• Nemzeti Örökség Intézete, Kossuth tér, booklet of the National Memorial Site (in Hungarian): https://intezet.nori.gov.hu/files/NEP/Kossuth_ter.pdf
• László Porhászka, The Danube Promenade (Budapest, Városháza, 1998), on Hungaricana: https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/VaroshazaKiado_0068/