The blind Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris next to the Natural History Museum, where he works as a curator. When Marie-Laure is twelve, the Nazis occupied Paris. Father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo in Breton; however, they took the museum's largest and most valuable treasure with them. Meanwhile, German Werner Pfennig, who grew up in an orphanage in a German mining town, and his younger sister Jutta, ends up in the Hitler Youth. He is then sent to the front. Finally, via Russia, he ends up in Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure's intersect.