[2] At the end of World War II, thousands of former Soviet POWs, repatriated from Germany, were sent to Siberia by Stalin, to be ‘re-educated'.

Living inside the cab is a young German woman, Elsa, surviving by hunting and gathering.

Having been on her own during the past years, she frequently talks to the old locomotive, calling it "Gustav" after her fiancé who was killed during the war.

The commissar shows his brutality when he shoots and kills a Russian woman wrongfully accused of sleeping with the Germans.

The final scene shows Ignat and Elsa making their escape on a railway pump car, to start a new life elsewhere in the Soviet Union.