Vignettes from the WWII, Holocaust, and Post-War Era

 The 2005 sculpture by Gyula Pauer won international honors. The concept designed by Can Togay featured 60 pairs of shoes, made of iron, to honor Jews executed by the fascist Arrow Cross Party in Budapest, Hungary during the winter of 1944-1945. Their bodies fell into the river as they were shot. Blown-up factories didn’t make boots and shoes at the end of the war. Shoes could be traded or sold on the black market, so the Jews were told to leave their shoes on the bank of the Danube. Laces were removed to tie the hands of the victims. They were executed without blindfolds. The militia shot one person to conserve ammunition; the body pulled the others tied to it into the river. Freezing water killed victims not yet dead. Children perished first. Any still alive were used as target practice. The Danube was called “The Jewish Cemetery.” Shoes bear the imprint of those who wore them, creating an intimacy with their deaths. The monument triggers shock at the brutality of the executions ...

  Kidnapping (systemic) of children under age of 8 “racially valuable” supposed descendants of German settlers: Over 200,000 children in Europe from: Poland, Russia, France, Ukraine, Belarus, Bohemia, Moravia (Czech Republic), and Slovenia were kidnapped by the Nazis. Toddlers were adopted by SS families, others were sent to German boarding schools for Germanization, forbidden to speak their native language, they were then adopted and raised as Germans. Children were later executed if they did not meet the “desired/acceptable racial and population growth values .”   Ideologies: racial superiority, antisemitism, and expansionism of the Third Reich. Tens of thousands of teenagers were kidnapped and sent to forced labor camps for the German war machine. Records were destroyed so reunification with families of origin was not possible after the war. Most of their families perished in the Holocaust. Find your own, Diana Mission Statement : I must write about the Holocaust to te...