Chronicles the first Vesper attack on Jan van Eyck's altarpiece at Ghent in the 1600s, then jumps to WWII and young Grace Cahill's desperate bid to save the masterwork from the Nazis.

From her home in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in 1942, eleven-year-old Milada is taken with other blond, blue-eyed children to a school in Poland to be trained as "proper Germans" for adoption by German families, but all the while she remembers her true name and history.

Bored and lonely after his family moves from Berlin to a place called "Out-With" in 1942, Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, befriends a boy in striped pajamas who lives behind a wire fence.

Twelve-year-old Lidia's life is forever changed by the Nazi occupation of Poland, leading her to join the resistance movement to fight against the Nazis and aid Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII.