During the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Lajos Kalanos escaped from the infamous Fö Utca prison in Budapest. Armed with a pistol and Molotov cocktails, the gaunt young man joined the revolutionaries who fought the Russians with fearless abandon—before personally hijacking a bus and fleeing via Austria to the Netherlands. He had heard from a fellow inmate that “in the Netherlands, milk cans stood by the roadside—a land of milk and honey. That’s where I had to go.” “Pure luck for you,” he once told me with a laugh, when we made a documentary in 1990—35 years after his escape—about his stolen youth.

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It truly was pure luck that editor-in-chief Ad Langebent quickly paired me, the youngest member of his reporting team, with Lajos. By then, Lajos had the physique and perseverance of a Centurion tank and moved like a man possessed through the world’s hotspots. With tireless colleagues like Willibrord Frequin and AVRO’s Pieter Varekamp, he had already filmed an entire body of work when he took me under his wing. From Vietnam to Chile, from the Palestinian Intifada to African famines—he taught me to push myself to the limit and to always seek original angles, restless and deeply emotional. He adored me, and I him. “Fonsio, let’s fantasize together,” he would say.

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I saw him cry many times behind the camera, especially when the circumstances brought back memories of his own past. At age 20, he had been arrested in Communist Hungary and endured five years of daily injustice and humiliation in labor camps and prisons. He had protested the land seizures that also affected his family. Before the uprising, Hungary was considered the most repressive regime in the former Eastern Bloc. And yet, Lajos could never fully let go of his attachment to his homeland. During our travels, he would sing Hungarian songs—songs that, over time, I learned to sing along with, phonetically, word for word. When we decided to make a documentary about his prison past—the driving force behind all his later work—it became the crowning expression of our deep bond.

At times, Lajos became the helpless prisoner again, especially when filming interviews with a former Party official from his youth, and a judge who had pronounced numerous death sentences. Overcome by grief and a thirst for justice, he struggled to gain control of the conversations. The Party man claimed to know nothing of the humiliation Lajos had endured. The judge barely remembered the hearings where he passed sentences whispered to him in advance by the secret police. He even confessed that he was usually dead drunk when delivering the final verdict. In Lajos’ cellblock, at least twenty young men were sentenced to death. They were hanged in the prison courtyard, with engine noise deliberately drowning out their final words so those in the cell blocks wouldn’t hear them.

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I felt immense compassion for him during the trip. He was lost for words, devastated. That night, we wandered through the streets of Budapest in tears. I admired his incredible strength when, the next day, he decided to return to the Fö Utca prison—hoping to set foot once more on the Sixth Floor of the grim building, where he had so often said farewell to condemned fellow inmates. The guards had been sadists. Hunger was constant. Lajos weighed barely 45 kilos when he arrived in the Netherlands. He was determined to show me.

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And then, something of a miracle happened. The next day, the ex-prisoner banged on the door of the damned complex. A soldier on duty opened up. The camera was rolling. Lajos jammed his foot in the doorway and began to speak—with such passion and conviction that more and more soldiers gathered to listen, spellbound. To our amazement, we were allowed to go up to the top floor. There, in a room filled with empty bunk beds, Lajos—the born storyteller—erected an unforgettable memorial to his condemned comrades. He described them so vividly they seemed to come alive again. “Their spirit is here. I will continue to carry their spirit with me. Whenever I saw hunger somewhere in the world, I was back here.”

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He told how they said goodbye to each other, when one of them was led to the gallows. One fellow inmate had given him a white handkerchief, saying: “If you make it out, give this to my mother.” “And his mother was buried with that handkerchief,” Lajos said, his voice breaking. It was too much. His words were choked in bottomless sorrow. “We never cried,” he added. “This is the first time I’ve cried here.” A Dutch newspaper would later call it “Granite in Tears.”

By the end of that day, we were all completely spent: cameraman Henk Jenner, sound man Ron van der Lugt, and producer Jutka Sallay. Jutka, like Lajos, was of Hungarian origin. She had worked for Brandpunt for years and later became a director at Spoorloos. Something beautiful also happened in Budapest: Lajos and Jutka fell in love and later married.

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In all the years that followed, I remained a regular guest in their home. They were my dearest friends. Their address became a safe harbor for me in an often chaotic life. Lajos, my great mentor, passed away in 2013. The much younger Jutka had only just retired when she died of cancer after a short illness. Every time I drive past Naarden on the A1, I think of them.