Shoes on the Danube

This is a small part of a world-famous composition, which comprises 60 pairs of metal shoes set in concrete on the Danube embankment in 2005. It commemorates the Hungarian Jewish victims of the killings committed by the Arrow Cross militiamen, the pro-German, anti-Semitic, national socialist party members of Hungary in 1944-1945. The killings took place en masse - the victims were stripped and lined up at the embankment, and shot in the back by execution squads so that they fell in to the Danube to be carried away by the current. At three separate places of the memorial, cast iron signs read in Hungarian, English and Hebrew: "To the memory of victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-45". It is a very simple but very moving memorial. We stumbled across it whilst walking on our last day in Budapest and found it hard to contemplate the horror of that time.