The Danube Embankment- Holocaust Memorial

The other day I decided to wander along the Pest side of the Danube embankment. It was a warm and sunny day, and well, it was nice just to by (a fairly polluted) river. hehe. The weather here has been a little crazy. It seems to thunder and storm then three minutes later the sun comes out again.Then the whole process starts again. We are into day four or five of this pattern (and it is reaking havoc on what to bring when I leave the house).....umbralla, sweater, coat, sunscreen, sunglasses, sandles or shoes...really, it could make a person mental! However, the crazy cloud movement makes the sky really cool to look at (including how the sun peeps out of the clouds). Look, here is an example. As I was walking along the embankment, I saw the St. Mathias church...look how the sun shines on it! Cool, eh?

I also walked by the Chain Bridge (again), and decided to take a picture of myself. You know, being a tourist allows you to do things like this :). SO here I am at the bridge. I also noticed that I there was something on my face. It was brown, and perhaps the remnants of the chocolate ice cream that I had had TWO hours before.

Just after the chain bridge, is the last entry point for the embankment. From there until the next bridge crossing the Danube, the only way to get off the Embankment is to run across the highway, past the pedestrian barrriers (which I may or may not have done). In this section, however, there is one small memorial that I really wanted to check out. It is a memorial to commemorate the half a million Hungarian Jews who were killed by the Hungarian Natzi Party (the Arrow Cross). It was probably one of the most powerful and chilling places and memorials I have ever been to. It seemed too real. I remembered reading at the museam of terror that the Arrow Cross party (the Natzi 'puppet' party in Hungary) executed jews during WWI by shooting them on this very embankment, allowing them to fall into the 'icy' Danube. The shoes were meant to represent these killings, with their shoes as as a reminder of their lives, their existence, and their tragic death...

The place was so open, so vulnerable, so... chilling. The detailing on the shoes made me get closer to them to make sure that they were actually bronze and not leather, some had candles in them, others had flowers. The shoes looked so real you could imagine a person wearing them, a person who once lived, it was the first time I had been at a memorial that was so humanistic, that really made me feel like the memorial was dedicated to the people not the horrible things that happened to them.

Stalin once said " one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic". I can tell you that this memorial made the half a million Hungarian Jews, and the six million European Jews, a tragedy.