In Budapest, on the east bank of the Danube River, in front of Hungary’s Parliament, is a very poignant WWII memorial. The memorial is called “Shoes on the Danube.” It reminds us of the horrors of the Holocaust and the depravity into which mankind can descend. It’s very simple: 60-pair of bronzed, old-fashioned shoes, the type worn in the 1940s. There are men’s shoes, women’s and children’s. They sit lined up on the stone wall along the promenade overlooking the river, haphazardly scattered, as though the owners stepped out with the intentions of soon returning. But they never did. The owners were shot and murdered, their bodies falling into the river to be carried downstream. The shoes honor the hundreds of Jews who were massacred, by anti-Semitic, Hungarian Nazi militiamen, during the winter of 1944-45. The Danube became known as “the Jewish Cemetery.”
Shalom Macon is a Messianic Jewish synagogue on New Forsyth Road in Bolingbroke. Damian Eisner is the rabbi. Last month John Pattan, a survivor of the siege of Budapest, gave his testimonial of events he witnessed to members of Shalom Macon during their weekly Shabbat services. Pattan has a deep love for Jewish people. Dr. Richard Eisner guided Pattan, a Christian, in a discussion of the contrasts between freedom and oppression. Pattan was a young boy, 6 and 7-years-old, when he saw horrors that nobody, certainly not children, should ever witness. When he was 18, his family fled communist oppression as the Soviets brutally crushed the people during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Now, he’s 87-years old, a United States citizen, and a Macon resident.