During WWII, Jews in Budapest were brought to the edge of the Danube, ordered to remove their shoes, and shot. 60 pairs of iron shoes now line the river’s bank in memorial of holocaust victims whose bodies fell into the river after execution.
Numerous images of the holocaust feature piles of abandoned clothing (photos taken at Auschwitz and Dachau). What is notable about these abandoned garments is not the clothes themselves, but the absence of a human form inside them. Abandoned shoes express this absence by retaining their form, as an explicit reference to the shape of the feet that once stood inside.
The Costume & Culture Museum 