It’s one of the least edifying episodes in Hungarian history.  The country likes to look back on the heroism of the ’56 Uprising against Russian vassalage, but I discovered on a recent Danube cruise a reminder of a more shameful image of its past.

I was unaware of the “Budapest Shoes” until our visit there.  These are iron sculptures of 60-odd pairs of shoes near the Parliament building by the Danube.  They commemorate hundreds of Hungarian nationals, mostly Jews who were rounded up from within the city, who were shot on its bank such that their bodies would topple over into the waters to float away.  Some, it is said, were tied together in 2’s and 3’s so that as one of them was shot the others would follow them in to drown.

Victims would be made to remove their shoes, a valuable commodity, before being despatched.

This took place at the end of the Second World War and a quick telling would lead you to believe that the killers were German.  They were not.

The reality is that they were shot by fellow Hungarians of the fascist Arrow Cross Party, an organisation faithfully pro-Nazi and the militia of the German-installed puppet government.

Nearby signs read “To the memory of victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944/45”.

The sculpture is both indescribably beautiful and heartbreaking.