Unlike a widely held belief, the extermination of Jews was not decided during the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. This idea had been haunting the minds of the German leaders since 1938 without having been formulated directly. The regime’s high dignitaries chose to accustom their subordinates to this funereal idea in a progressive way, first by taking a series of anti Semitic laws, then deciding to temporary lock them up in ghettos. But they went far beyond… The 1 000 ghettos will be part of the logic of the genocide. This film allows us to consider the ghettos in a new light: these spaces have been an integral part of the Holocaust and its macabre process from the beginning.