Line 41

Line 41 is a documentary propelled by the charismatic storytelling and reliving of the past by Natan Grossmann, a Holocaust survivor, as he returns to today's Łódź after leaving Poland at the age of 17.Suppressing memories of his captivity for most of his adult life, Grossmann starts a late quest for his missing brother and traces of his parents who perished in the ghetto. During his search he crosses paths with Jens-Jürgen Ventzki, son of the former Nazi Head Mayor of Łódź. Ventzki is pursuing his family's dark secret. In tracing their family histories, they inevitably confront each other.

During World War II, there was no other city in Europe where Germans, Poles and Jews lived physically so close to each other, yet practically worlds apart as in Lodz. Under German rule, the second largest ghetto on occupied Polish soil was established. The suffering of the imprisoned Jewish people was plainly visible to streetcar passengers on their trips through the ghetto from the surrounding ‘free’ city. To the captives in the ghetto, Line 41 was a sign of their own powerlessness and the indifference of those who rode the streetcar everyday: Germans and Poles.

70 years later Grossmann is immersed in an emotional confrontation with the past. As Grossmann gradually uncovers details about his brother’s fate, memories of his parents and life and death in the ghetto return.