Beauty and Sadness on the Danube

I’m on a ten-year-in-the-making trip with my daughter. As we sail down the Danube, we keep stopping to visit castle districts, pause in churches, walk narrow streets in medieval cities, see great art, and hear transcendent music. And there’s the beauty of the river making its way through ten countries.

But sprinkled through charm are constant reminders of how Europe has been pummeled by war.

In memory of the 3,500 people who were lined up on bank of the Danube, told to remove their shoes, and shot into the river, sculptor Gyula Pauer created sixty pairs of period-appropriate shoes out of iron. Then he fastened them securely to the bank.

In Budapest, we saw rows of communist bloc housing. During World War II, eighty percent of the city was bombed. So after the Soviets drove the Nazis from the city, they built massive concrete structures filled with flats. Some of buildings have now been brightened with color and balconies, but they continue to remind Hungarians that they have come under military occupation one too many times.

Hungary’s national anthem may be the saddest in the world.  For eight stanzas, it laments lost wars, slavery, corpses, and destroyed cities. In the song, Hungarians beg God for relief from their long-ill fate. This haunting music moved me, even though I was hearing it through the tinny speaker of a bus.

“This is my city,” said our guide on the bus. “And the city of my parents and grandparents. But I’m telling you, and it is true, that we are the grouchiest people in the world.”

“Not me,” she added, “and not my family. Just everyone else.”

She paused.

“After all,” she said, her voice now serious, “we’ve been through it!”

Beauty and sadness—both are touching my daughter and me.