The film was the first cinematographic work in history around the Holocaust subject, directed by Alain Resnais at the request of the Comité d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale in 1955, on the occasion of the ten years of the end of the conflicts. It alternates between color images of the concentration camps in the fifties and black and white archive photographs from that time, enriched with Jean Cayrol ́s (poet, writer, and concentration camp survivor) narrative text, to reflect on the essay film ́s main theme: the understanding of the Holocaust not as a punctual event in a specific site, but as an universal issue that can happen again in the future. Like a true essayist, the narrator constantly expresses the own film ́s limitation to reveal the concentration camp ́s reality, only reaching its surface. The archive images would never expose the true perception of who lived it. Therefore, the film reveals a paradox: the attempt to communicate something that it itself considers incommunicable.