Train of Life
1998 film by Radu Mihăileanu
Train of Life (French: Train de vie) is a 1998 tragicomedy film by France, Belgium, Netherlands, Israel and Romania made in the French language. It tells the story of an eastern European Jewish village's plan to escape the Holocaust.
Plot
The film starts off with a man, named Schlomo (Lionel Abelanski), running crazily through a forest, with his voice playing in the background, saying that he has seen the horror of the Nazis in a nearby town, and he must tell the others. Once he gets into town, he informs the rabbi, and together they run through the town and once they have got enough people together, they hold a town meeting. At first, many of the men do not believe the horrors they are being told, and many criticize Schlomo, for he is the town lunatic, and who could possibly believe him? But the rabbi believes him, and then they try to tackle the problem of the coming terrors. Amidst the pondering and the arguing, Schlomo suggests that they build a train, so they can escape by deporting themselves. Some of their members pretend to be Nazis in order to ostensibly transport them to a concentration camp, when in reality, they are going to Palestine via Russia. Thus the Train of Life is born.
On their escape route through rural Eastern Europe, the train sees tensions between its inhabitants, close encounters with real Nazis as well as Communist partisans, and fraternization with the Roma, until the community arrives just at the frontlines between German and Soviet fire.
The public source identifies “Train of Life” as 1998 film by Radu Mihăileanu. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Train, Life and film.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q228293. 7 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 7 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Train of Life” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.