Sixty pairs of rusted period shoes in all styles and sizes had been cast in iron. Different sizes and styles suggested no one had been spared - rich, poor, young, old, mother, child, peasant, professional - all had been forced at gunpoint, usually in the middle of the night, to march to the banks of the Danube River just south of Budapest's grand Parliament building; all had been instructed to remove their shoes; thereafter, all had been shot before falling into the river that carried them away.
History can be such a beast.
I take that back. War can be a beast, a beast created by man.
We're the only species on the planet that kills our own.
Walking in the footsteps of those lost so tragically decades ago, I lamented humanity's capacity to inflict pain again and again and again in the name of religion, power, politics, land, money; pick your poison.
I wondered, too, just how long mankind might continue ignoring the past before we have no future.