Tarkosvky shows real footage of occupied Berlin, including the charred corpse of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of propaganda, and the bodies of his six children murdered by their parents in Berlin on 1 May 1945.
The movie was based on a short story "Ivan" by Vladimir Bogomolov. Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his book "Sculpting in Time" later that he did not find the book very good, but stories that were not well written were easier to adapt into films.
Trostanyets (spelling from the DVD subtitles), the camp mentioned by Ivan, is the Trostinets extermination camp. (Alternative spellings include Maly Trostinets, Maly Trastsianiets and Trascianec.) It was a World War II death camp located at Maly Trostinets ("Little Trostinets"), a village near the outskirts of Minsk. Operating between July 1942 and October 1943, nearly all Jews in Minsk were murdered there.
In 2009, the film's opening was shown on Cartoon Network one morning due to the channel accidentally having its signal switched with Turner Classic Movies, which was airing the film at the time.
Nikolay Burlyaev is seen in this film ringing a bell. He would, 4 years later, play the character of Boriska - who shall build a giant bell - in Andrei Tarkovsky's next feature Andrei Rublev (1966).