The memorial was conceived by film director Can Togay, not only to honor the victims, but also to force the nation to look into the past pact of a section of its citizenry with the evil Nazi machinery. Sculptor Gyula Pauer then brought it to reality in the April of 2005. Sam had arrived in Budapest from the US, in the midst of a new Presidential regime that severely fragmented the country right along a political fault line giving rise to the emergence of political parties with extreme hate-filled ideologies against the ethnic and religious minorities, creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty for the future.
Sam went around each and every single shoe in this memorial repeating to himself those famous words from historian George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”