Shoah Shoes
by Helen L. Conway
Eighty-seven days before my Beit Din I go to see the shoes. They lie out past the ruin bars, tchotchke shops and steaming hot baths of Budapest, out in the lee of the Szecheyni chain bridge. Sixty sculpted pairs sit scattered by the Danube. Cold iron Oxfords. Metal sling back dress heels, scuffed from dancing. Ferrous sandals sized for six year olds. A yahrzeit candle sits in a slack-tongued boot. Piles of memorial pebbles rest on immortalised pumps.
In eighty-seven days, the Rabbinical Court will ask me: Why do you want to be Jewish?
Judaism, this questioning, searching, history-defying faith is familiar with the word why.
And also, when, who, where, how.
Starting in December 1944, members of the far-right Arrow Cross Party marched eight hundred Jews to the place on the river where Zlotan Street peters out. They arrayed them like coconut shies, shot them and watched their bodies keel and submerge in the gunmetal winter waters. First, they made them remove their footwear. Shoes, at least, were valued in 1944.
When does death start? When the frigid water soaks up your last gasp of oxygen? When the bullet cracks the cranium? When the capacity of another to recognise your humanity dissipates like smoke leaving a crematorium?
Starting in December 1944, members of the far-right Arrow Cross Party marched eight hundred Jews to the place on the river where Zlotan Street peters out. They arrayed them like coconut shies, shot them and watched their bodies keel and submerge in the gunmetal winter waters.
My father is a fell-walker despite his newly false knees and failing hip. Cumbria brings him freedom and wet feet. When I arrive to show him the photographs from my travels, he has just returned from fording a swollen stream that should not have been in his way according to the map he misread. He has more joy than sense. While he waits for my mother to arrive with hot tea and a telling off, he peels off his sodden socks. His big toes slope inward like mine, his inflamed bunion an indication of where mine is heading. Our shared tendency to translucent skin around the ankle crease, a touch of scaliness on the dorsum of the foot comes from his mother Grandma Ethel.
When did my life start? When I slipped out of the womb, thin as a skinned moggy and caterwauling accordingly? The moment of conception? If dry-skinned Ethel helped form my body, from where did the soul within it arrive?
In eighty-seven days, the rabbis will ask: Are you converting for marriage?
No, I will say.
Do you have Jewish descent?
Not that the DNA test shows, I will say.
The sun over the Danube is low-slung now, The proximity of nightfall has cleared the Quay. I crouch to a pair of high-fronted kitten heels, run my finger around their rigid rim, remembering a person I never knew. Below my creaking knees the toes of my trainers flex. The bow on the left one slips undone to the stone below.
The Arrow Party removed the laces from some of the children’s shoes and used them to tie the hands of their mothers.
When do converts become Jewish? When they act on the longing and begin to live the traditions, ease into living the questions? When the court convenor says, “You are now our sister?” When they come for us with guns?
Sixty-one pairs of empty shoes on the Danube now. Under my arches, the kitten-heels are damp, narrow-toed, unforgiving. I subsume the heavy absence above them.
My father, still in post-op recovery, has his eye on the exhilaratingly thin ridge of Striding Edge. He requests waterproof snow boots and clip-on ice crampons for his next birthday. My mother and sister and I confer. He was born in December 1944. He has metal holding his femur to his tibia. None of us think this is a wise gift.
The kabbalah teaches gilgul neshama, the reincarnation of the soul. Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi said: to where could six million return all at once? To the bodies of the gentiles, that is where.
Helen L. Conway lives in St. Helens, UK. A former Judge, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is the author or joint-author of over a dozen books and numerous articles about law, art, mental health and coaching psychology. She is also an internationally exhibited and collected visual artist working in textiles and acrylics and is a qualified creativity and leadership coach.
