The Red Shoes of Auschwitz

During my most recent time (several days) at the main Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, I saw, heard and experienced many disturbing things.

I walked through the cold, dark 'Death Barracks' where female prisoners deemed too ill to work were warehoused until executed in a gas chamber. I saw the field where the ashes of countless people remain buried after their bodies were burned outside when the crematorium broke. I saw the cell where prisoners were kept until they starved to death. I walked past the building where heinous experiments were carried out on Jewish women. I entered one of the gas chambers and walked past the ovens. 

Then there were the glass-fronted display rooms that housed all sorts of  brushes, suitcases, eyeglasses, pots and pans, artificial limbs, even human hair. But of all these macabre items, it was the shoes that had the greatest impact on me this time, as a couple of years ago. Yes, the shoes. Ordinary, everyday shoes in the styles of the 1940s.

Why the shoes? I wondered. But think about it. Aside from the eyeglasses, shoes are perhaps the most personal of the items taken from the prisoners, nearly all of them Jewish. Their clothes were laundered and sent to Germany for use by the wartime civilian population. Most shoes were sent to Germany as well. But some shoes remained in the camp, perhaps at the end of the war when the Nazis realized they were losing the war and running out of time. Some shoes were given to prisoners, but without regard to size or practicality. Some received two left shoes, for example. Most prisoners were forced to wear wooden clogs.

When Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet soldiers on Jan. 27, 1945, the camp held some 43,000 pairs of shoes. Let that sink in. More than 43,000 pairs of shoes, each pair representing a human life. There are shoes of all sizes, all kinds and all styles. 

Most are brown. Most are well worn. But among the thousands of brown shoes on display, I spotted two red shoes, of different styles. Their color made them stand out from the rest. And so I began to wonder, Who was the person who once wore these shoes? Where did she live? What was her name, her story? How old was she? Did she perish immediately, or did she die later of starvation or disease? Did she die along with other members of her family? These are questions whose answers will never be known.

Despite never being able to know anything about the wearer of these red shoes, I feel a certain connection to her. In my mind, I see her as young, fun-loving, perhaps somewhat bold, and certainly full of life. 

Few physical items are more personal than the shoes people wore. Shoes take on the shape of the feet that wear them every day. They are chosen by the people who wear them, whether for comfort, style or color. Each of these 43,000 pairs of shoes, and countless uncounted millions of other shoes, were removed from the feet of people imprisoned and doomed to death because of who they were. It doesn't matter whether the people were Polish political prisoners, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Jews or homosexuals. All were rounded up, stripped of possessions and their identities, and murdered simply because one group of evil people decided they must die.

Piles of shoes in Auschwitz and other death camps served several purposes. They were a reminder to the Nazis of the success of their ongoing efforts to cleanse the Nazi empire of anyone and everyone not 'Aryan' enough. They provided shoes for German civilians. And they served as reminders to those still imprisoned that they, too, would soon join those whose shoes were part of a huge pile of items taken from people who no longer needed them.

I don't plan to return to Auschwitz again, having visited the camps twice. But I don't think I ever will forget the red shoes and wonder about the person who once wore them.