Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer, orphaned when his parents both commit suicide on the same day, goes to live with his aunt and uncle in Nova Scotia in 1941 and falls in love with Tilda, his cousin by adoption, but things go tragically wrong when Tilda brings home German student Hans Mohring, a young man viewed with suspicion by everyone in town.

As World War II draws to an end, Russian soldiers occupy Schwarz, Germany, bringing both friendships and hardship to the family of ten-year-old Fritz, whose grandfather was a Nazi sympathizer, and after they are forced to leave their farm, Fritz's mother and hired hand are arrested, leaving Fritz to fend for himself.

Joe Hamada and his family face growing prejudice in their Seattle community after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and are eventually torn away from their home and sent to a relocation camp in California, even as his older brother joins the U.S. Army to fight in World War II.

After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from their flower farm in California to an internment camp on a Mojave Indian reservation in Arizona during World War II, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop.

Tom Jericho has been called out of retirement to join in a race to crack the Nazi's secret code, Enigma, in order to save Allied troops from a deadly German attack.

In their small New York town, two teenaged girls become friends while helping each other make sense of their families, neighbors, and selves as they approach adulthood in the years preceding World War II.