With 1,200 archival photographs, the album is the largest published collection of pictures presenting the faces of German and Soviet terror in the occupied Polish territories during World War II. It depicts the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia and the grim everyday reality of occupied Poland: mass executions, arrests, pacifications of Polish villages, but also the extermination of the Jewish population, displacement, deportations to forced labor in Germany and the Soviet Gulag, and the functioning of camps and prisons of all kinds. The selected iconographic material was compiled after analysing the collections of the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance and many other institutions in Poland and abroad, consisting of tens of thousands of photographs.