It happens every so often that you look out your window in Budapest to see the city transformed: not by snow or rain, but entirely changed into another city or another time. If the year was 2002 and you were living on Lórinc Pap Tér, an unassuming square in the inner Eight District, instead of mothers and baby carriages, newly planted shrubbery, and a sign for a cellar pub, you might see rubble, billboards in German, a line of goose-stepping soldiers, and a small boy wearing prison garb. The entire scene would have looked like you had time-traveled back to WWII.

In fact, what was transpiring was a shot for the film Fateless, derived from Nobel Prize-winning author, late Imre Kertész’s book Fatelessness (also translated as Fateless in some editions). The novel was lauded by the Nobel Prize committee as containing “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history,” and is considered both a cornerstone in Holocaust literature and a modern classic. Indeed, the story, though written as fiction, was based on Kertész’s own childhood experience. The narrative follows György “Gyuri” Köves as he is sent to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Zeitz; documents his trials there, and ends with his eventual release and return to Budapest.

Academy Award-nominated director Lajos Koltai used Kertész’s own screenplay to shoot from, making use of locations in and around Budapest. With a 12 million dollar budget, it was one of the most expensive Hungarian films ever made and garnered a Golden Berlin Bear nomination for its director. It is rumored that when the late author Kertész visited the set, he had to leave after just half an hour, because he was so disturbed by the accuracy with which the filmmakers had recreated WWII Hungary. Just one look out on Lórinc Pap Tér would affirm that every care was taken to get terrifying details down to the point where even onlookers felt a chill.