Walk a Mile in my Shoes
When our precious grandson came to stay last summer, the sight of his little trainers nestling between those of his parents in our hall brought a lump to my throat. The family live abroad and Joshua was born during Covid, so we’ve barely seen him in his short life. I put the photo I took up on Twitter and it received more likes than anything else I’ve posted. Such is the power of shoes to tell a story.
In researching my fourth novel, ‘The Orphans on the Train’ I discovered an even more poignant testimony to the emotive force of footwear. The book is set in World War Two Budapest. Bombed by the allies, invaded by the Red Army, occupied by Germans and savaged by its own Arrow Cross members, the city’s inhabitants suffered terribly throughout 1944 and 1945. None more than the Jewish population. In the freezing winter at the end of the war, people were lined up by the Danube, made to take off their shoes, then shot so that their bodies tumbled into the river. This atrocity was later commemorated by the Shoes on the Danube memorial.
It’s a heart-breaking sight. Modern replicas represent the shoes of those so brutally murdered. Three in particular caught my eye: two small boots lined up behind a pair of brogues and some court shoes. As though a child had stood behind parents who were powerless to protect him, the whole family facing its terrible fate together. What horrendous thoughts went through their minds in those last fateful moments? More footwear is strewn down the bank, sixty pairs of shoes in total, representing the 3,500 people shot during the Arrow Cross reign of terror. When I visited the memorial, people were wandering round it in deep sadness, many openly crying for those whose lives were so cruelly cut short. The shoes, and the stories they represent, have the power to arouse such strong emotions.
Shoes are so much more than mere foot coverings. There’s a saying, ‘Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.’ To wear someone’s shoes is to take on their identity, to put our feet on the imprints made by theirs, to discover what it’s like to live their life, to empathise with their experience.
That’s what novelists try to do. I didn’t live through World War Two, although my parents did and my childhood was shaped by their wartime ordeals. In seeking to bring that period to life, I tried to imagine what it was like to lose one’s family, one’s home and one’s possessions. That was the experience of so many. My interest in 1940’s Hungary, was piqued by reading about Éva Székely, a talented swimmer living in Budapest. As a Jewish girl she was not allowed to train, so she ran up and down stairs one hundred times a day – her own shoes echoing around the stairwell of the safe house in which she and her family hid during the latter part of the war. Later she was to win an Olympic gold medal. What perseverance and tenacity in the face of hardship.
These are the qualities I aim to celebrate in ‘The Orphans on the Train.’ My story also features a Scottish missionary who dedicated her life to a school for Christian and Jewish girls in Budapest, and three brave men who risked everything to protect the Jewish population. In them we find the selflessness, courage and goodness that give us hope for humanity. Perhaps their inspiration came from their own deep-seated empathy – the ability to walk in someone’s shoes.