Inspired by the harrowing true stories of those who hid from the Nazis in the sewers, this emotional testament to the power of friendship follows Ella, an affluent Polish girl, as she helps Sadie and her pregnant mother survive despite the worsening dangers of the war.

"Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation...Helena discovers an American paratrooper stranded outside their small mountain village...Risking the safety of herself and her family, she hides Sam--a Jew--but Helena's concern for the American grows into something much deeper...[as] Helena is forced to contend with the jealousy her...

When Jozef is commissioned to paint a portrait of the younger daughter of Kraków's grand Oderfeldt family, it is only his desperate need for money that drives him to accept. He has no wish to indulge a pampered child-princess or her haughty, condescending parents -- and almost doesn't notice Alicia's bookish older sister, Karolina. But when he is ushered by a servant into their house on Kraków's fashionable Bernady ska street in the winter of 1937,...

In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed 'Hansel' and 'Gretel'. They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called 'witch' by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village...

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbour, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount,...

Follows the experiences of a young orphan raised in a World War II-era French convent, where she longs for her real mother and suffers at the hands of a remorseless abbess before eventually joining the French resistance.