The first day of our Road Scholar tour we left our fellow scholars to the bus tour that we had taken when we first arrived in Budapest, and walked to the ship for lunch and to leave our backpacks.
Our destination was a monument or art installation, depending on one's perspective, called the Shoes On the Danube Promenade.
The bronze reproduce real shoes left by Hungarian Jews who were marched to the river and shot, falling into the river.
Someone had left a pair of sneakers next to the bronze shoes. They had been thrown some distance away when we retraced our steps/
Our Hungarian guide from our first tour had told us that she herself was a survivor of this event. Her father had been in a line of Jews being walked to the river to be shot on Christmas eve. She showed a photo of the event, a line of people walking straight through the crowd of happy holiday shoppers. Everyone knew their fate. Her father took a breath, and very calmly stepped out of the line to blend into the crowd. He did not run or look back, simply took his place in the throng. He survived. The rest -- were shot so their bodies fell into the river.
We returned to the ship to get settled before our second Road Scholar tour, from Budapest to Istanbul. We were treated to another evening cruise that night, made more exciting than the first by brilliant lightening just on the hilltops. When we finished our cruise along the Budapest river banks, we headed east into the dark.
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