France is engulfed in the flames of World War II. Large cities and small villages are occupied by the Nazis, enemy planes dominate the skies, and despair, death, and suffering surround everyone. Vianne Mauriac, a rural schoolteacher, sends her husband off to war and must endure unimaginable challenges daily to save her family: surviving without food or money, sharing her home with the enemy, and enduring inhuman hardships.
Her eighteen-year-old sister, Isabelle, joins the Resistance movement. Together with her comrades, she believes that France will endure and that, sooner or later, the enemy will be defeated. While thousands of French citizens submit to the enemy and try to adapt to grim circumstances, a delicate young woman, hunted by the Wehrmacht and the SS, becomes an elusive guide, saving dozens of Allied pilots by secretly leading them across the Pyrenees.
Vianne and Isabelle are very different, and in this war, each walks her own path and achieves her own heroism.
