On the banks of the River Danube in Hungary’s capital, Budapest, visitors sometimes stumble upon a scattering of empty shoes. Fixed and immobile above the river’s current, these are shoes sculpted from iron, although they look as haphazardly discarded as any piece of Cinderella’s glass detritus.
In the winter of 1944-5, thousands of Hungary’s Jewish population were forced here to remove their shoes. Shoes were valuable to their killers; shoes could be resold. The human beings – excess to requirements – were tied in groups of three and shot on the banks of the river. If all three fell into the freezing water together with the force of one shot, the Hungarian, Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross militia could save on bullets. Just a few Jewish people survived to tell the tale. Among them, young members of my extended family.
Even before the news from Bucha in Ukraine filtered out on to our news bulletins last week, we all knew that massacres were again being carried out in Europe. When I write of “we”, I mean those of us with access to uncensored, non-Russian news; I mean those of us who listen and believe when the children of Mariupol or Kharkiv tell us that they are alive because they were able to run faster than their parents.
The prosaic motif of these stories is not just sadism, but greed. Ukrainian sources allege that Russian families are sending their soldiers “shopping lists” of loot requested from captured towns. Not every such story can be verified, but certainly one of the most repeated and credible reports from civilians is of Russian soldiers breaking into houses and demanding the family’s PlayStation. Back in Budapest in 1944, the Red Army carried off radios from the homes of women they raped; now they nick games consoles. Same depravity, different tech. Save on bullets, and flog the shoes.
Against such patterns of human brutality, is it helpful to draw parallels between historical atrocities? When I listen to anyone who comes from a community that has survived multiple atrocities – whether in Hungary and Ukraine, or Bosnia and Syria – there is a particular trauma in seeing the cyclical return of conflict to those same communities, or to an ancestral home long abandoned for exile. Recognising patterns is important. But the case of Hungary – and of its empty shoes – gives us a warning about relying on this kind of rhetoric.
When I write of “we” who knew long before this week about Vladimir Putin’s massacres, I also mean the heads of European governments, with their access to secret intelligence sources – men like Viktor Orbán, re-elected in questionable circumstances last weekend for a fourth term as President of Hungary.
Hungary endured a miserable mid-20th century as a battlefield between Soviet Russian and Nazi forces – whatever their background, most Hungarian families have their own oral history of horrors. Yet Mr Orbán, who has never met an autocrat he couldn’t emulate, has cosied up to Russia’s latest strongman while simultaneously rehabilitating the memory of Hungary’s historic Nazi appeasers.
Since his election victory, his support for Putin has only become more vocal; in his victory speech, he attacked Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, as one of his own political “opponents”.
Orbán had some reason to view Ukraine’s wartime President with hostility. Two weeks ago, in an address to EU leaders, Zelensky publicly shamed Orbán for his recalcitrance over EU sanctions packages and his closeness to Putin. While doing so, he deployed an extraordinarily loaded symbol – the image of the Danube’s empty shoes.
“Listen Viktor, do you know what’s going on in Mariupol?… I’ve been to Budapest before… I was walking on the waterfront, I saw the monument, the shoes on the banks of the Danube, about the massacres. I was there with my family… And that is what Russia is doing today. The same shoes. The same people in Mariupol: adults and children, grandparents. There are thousands. And thousands left.”
Zelensky was right. Orbán did know what was going on in Mariupol – probably better than most of us. And Zelensky was right that a slaughter of innocents was occurring in Ukraine, just as once a slaughter of innocents occurred in Budapest.
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But men like Orbán react badly to being shamed. The question of culpability for the local Holocaust is deeply contested in his Hungary. Like so many nationalist leaders, Orbán has spent his career denying the guilt of his political forebears, rising to power by promising to make Hungarians feel proud in the world. In nations, as in people, shame brings out our worst selves.
Since Zelensky’s speech, a handful of opposition protesters have visited the Danube to leave their own shoes standing empty in solidarity with Ukraine – but these are the very people over whom Orbán claimed victory on Sunday night.
Viktor Orbán’s hurt feelings are hardly the most important factor to consider when we assess the rhetoric of the President of Ukraine. But there is another problem with his Danube parallel, one raised particularly by Jewish groups.
The victims of the Arrow Cross in 1944-45 were killed very specifically because they were Jewish; in Ukraine in the same years, other Jewish communities were exterminated by Nazi groups and sometimes even by Ukrainian nationalists. Zelensky is himself part-Jewish – although as the American writer Alex Zeldin argues cogently in The Atlantic this week, he was seemingly raised in the aftermath of a Soviet narrative that reframed the Holocaust as a function of fascism’s wider wartime slaughter of the working class, Russian soldiers chief among them.
Such retellings, one demographic’s tragedy set against another’s, are precisely the problem. European history is not a competition between different communities for the prize of who has suffered most – but there are risks, when we merge all of our massacres together in memory, that we become numb to the historical specificity of how we let each one happen.
Yet if it is risky to elide the victims of history’s genocides, the function and mechanics of crimes against humanity recur with painful familiarity. The looting, the rape, the efficiency of murder, victims lined up in tidy rows. In the case of Bucha, Mariupol and Kharkiv, just as in the case of Budapest, we are talking about atrocities the world saw coming.
We in the West ignored Putin’s barbarity in Chechnya, in Syria and in Crimea and Donbas. One question persists from 1945 to 2022 – who knew what, and when?
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