THE TRAIN OF LIFE

The movie starts off with a man, Shlomo running in a crazy manner all around his town, his voice playing in the background, saying that he has seen the Nazis in a nearby town. Once he gets to his destination, he proceeds to inform the same the rabbi and the entire population of the said town. In a few hours, they assemble all the townsfolk and meeting.  Many of the men do not believe the terror that they are being told of, and many criticize Shlomo for feeding them bullshit, for he is known to be the town lunatic. But the rabbi believes him, and then they try to tackle the problem of the coming Nazis who are sure to drag the entire town of Jews to concentration camps.

Amidst all the confusion and chaos surrounding the topic of what needs to be done, Shlomo suggests that they should build a train, so that they can escape . Some of their members can pretend to be Nazis in order to transport them to a concentration camp, when in reality, they would be going to Palestine, their holy land, through Russia. The way the escape plan works out is actually quite magical and frankly speaking surreal. They happen to purchase and become owners of a train that is extremely shabby and banged up by midnight and somehow it becomes spotless and looks as good as new within a few hours of people working on it.

While on their escape, the train and the villagers experience misunderstanding between the villagers, encounter with real Nazis, Communists, and gypsies and the finally they arrive right in the middle of German and Soviet fire.

The movie ends with Shlomo himself, who recites the stories of his ‘train mates’ after the train arrived in the Soviet Union. According to him some went on to Palestine, some stayed in the Soviet Union, and some even went to America. As he is telling this, the camera close-up of his face, he says, “That is the true story of my shtetl…”, but then the camera zooms-out, showing him grinning and wearing the striped prisoner’s clothes of the concentration camps and is shown to be behind the behind the barbed wire of the said concentration camp. He ends with, “Ye nu, almost the true story!.”  So I am assuming that he became completely mad because he had seen most of his companions and townsfolk executed, including the girl he loved dearly. He thus made up this whole story for himself in order to give him some sort of solace that is the fact that HE was able to save his entire town despite being a lunatic.

The message that I  got through this film  was that no matter how insane or absurd an idea is, it’s still a masterpiece in itself and even the most impractical design is still achievable. It was the very definition of the quote - “If we can dream it, we can achieve it .”