Following this commentary, the film provides a succession of scenes in which Jews are portrayed as an uncivilized, parasitic people with low social standing. The images were mostly shot on site in the Warsaw Ghetto and other Polish ghettos, showing subjects who were deliberately chosen to be poorly dressed, dirty and who had partially toothless grins. The locations shown are dirty and infested by vermin. Robert Reimer asserts that a central theme of the film is the assertion that "Jews have always lived in the ghettos and in fact they "choose" to live this way." According to Reimer, the film asserts that ghettos are "ordinary normal" aspects of Jewish life. Reimer charges that what the film is actually showing is not the normal life of Polish Jewry but rather the "effect of the Nazi administration and the disruption of the lives of millions of Polish Jews." Erik Barnouw describes the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi conquest as a place where "hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded by the Nazi conquerors into pockets of indescribable misery." He describes footage shot there as showing "half-starved, unshaven creatures caught in pathetic acts of barter – a pair of socks for a scrap of food." It is scenes such as these that the film presents as showing Jews "in their natural state."