After the establishing shot of Montluc prison, but before the opening credits, the camera rests on a plaque commemorating the 7,000 prisoners who died at the hands of the Nazis.
Part One of the film, The Collapse, has an extended interview with Pierre Mendès France. He was jailed by the Vichy government on charges of desertion, but escaped from jail to join Charles de Gaulle's forces operating out of England, and later served as Prime Minister of liberated France.
Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), the head of a Resistance network, is arrested by Vichy French police, imprisoned in a camp, and transported to Paris for questioning. He makes a daring escape.
The action takes place in France during the Second World War.
A young Jewish girl, Sarah, is looking to escape the clutches of the Third Reich after seeing her parents and sister brutally slain by a smuggler who betrayed them while attempting to escape to England. Terrified, she is sheltered by her childhood friend Jean, a homosexual in a clandestine relationship with his lover Philippe.
It is June 1940, during the Battle of France. After five-year-old Paulette's parents and pet dog die in a German air attack on a column of refugees fleeing Paris, the traumatized child meets 10-year-old Michel Dollé whose peasant family takes her in. She quickly becomes attached to Michel. The two attempt to cope with the death and destruction that surrounds them by secretly building a small cemetery among the ruins of an abandoned watermill, where they bury her dog and start to bury other animals, marking their graves with crosses stolen from a local graveyard, including one belonging to Michel's brother. Michel's father first suspects that Michel's brother's cross was stolen from the graveyard by his neighbour. Eventually, the father finds out that Michel has stolen the cross.
During the winter of 1943-44, Julien Quentin, a student at a Carmelite boarding school in occupied France, is returning to school from vacation. He acts tough to the students at the school, but he is actually a pampered mother's boy who still wets his bed. Saddened to be returning to the tedium of boarding school, Julien's classes seem uneventful until Père Jean, the headmaster, introduces three new pupils. One of them, Jean Bonnet, is the same age as Julien. Like the other students, Julien at first despises Bonnet, a socially awkward boy with a talent for arithmetic and playing the piano.
Summer 1941. Over Nazi-occupied France, a Royal Air Force B17 Flying Fortress becomes lost after a mission and is shot down over Paris by German flak. The crew, Sir Reginald, Peter Cunningham and Alan MacIntosh, parachute out over the city, where they run into and are hidden by a house painter, Augustin Bouvet, and the grumbling conductor of the Opéra National de Paris, Stanislas Lefort. Involuntarily, Lefort and Bouvet get themselves tangled up in the manhunt against the aviators led by Wehrmacht Major Achbach as they help the airmen to escape to the free zone with the help of Resistance fighters and sympathisers.
Au mois de juin 1940, alors que les troupes allemandes envahissaient le territoire français, eut lieu "la plus grande action de sauvetage menée par une seule personne pendant l'Holocauste" : plus de trente mille personnes, dont dix mille juifs, purent en effet échapper à la barbarie nazie. Un homme seul, bravant sa hiérarchie et les ordres du dictateur Salazar, choisit en son âme et conscience de permettre à des dizaines de milliers de réfugiés de rejoindre son pays, le Portugal, en organisant une distribution de visas ininterrompue pendant plusieurs jours. Cet homme, c'est Aristides de Sousa Mendes, consul de Bordeaux.
In 1944, art masterpieces stolen by the Wehrmacht from French museums are being shipped to Germany; the officer in charge of the operation, Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Scofield), is an ardent art lover and is determined to take the art to Germany, no matter the cost. After the Germans remove the art chosen by Waldheim from the Jeu de Paume Museum, curator Mademoiselle Villard (Suzanne Flon) seeks help from the French Resistance. Given the imminent liberation of Paris by the Allies, they need only delay the train for a few days—still, it is a dangerous operation and it must be done in such a way that does not risk damaging the priceless cargo.
En France, durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Sabine Zlatin, une juive d'origine polonaise naturalisée française vit à Montpellier avec son mari Miron Zlatin. Elle est infirmière militaire, il est agronome. Mais dans la France sous occupation allemande, les juifs doivent se cacher pour ne pas être déportés dans les camps. Lorsque Sabine rencontre Léa Feldblum, une jeune femme juive dissimulant son identité, celle-ci lui fait rejoindre l'organisation de l'Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE). Sa mission sera dès lors de sauver les enfants enfermés dans les camp de transit, mais elle a de plus en plus de difficultés à trouver un foyer pour les enfants. Elle fonde alors à Izieu la colonie d’enfants réfugiés de l’Hérault, où pensionnent les orphelins jusqu'à une rafle organisée le 6 avril 1944 à l'initiative de Klaus Barbie.
Un homme d'une soixantaine d'années demeure avec sa nièce dans une maison du Dauphiné, dans la France occupée pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La Kommandantur envoie un officier allemand loger chez eux, en zone libre. Le père de cet officier, qui avait survécu, avait lui connu la défaite de l'Allemagne face à la France, durant la Première Guerre mondiale.
Claude (Alain Cohen) is an 8-year-old Jewish boy living in France during the Nazi occupation. To reduce the chance that he would be sent to Auschwitz or a similar fate, his parents send him to live with a farm family, the elderly parents of Catholic friends of his parents. (In reality, many French urban Jews made similar choices for their children.) The elderly couple honestly think that the boy has been sent to live with them because Paris is dangerous; it never crosses their mind that Claude is a Jew.
In 1944 Lucien Lacombe, a 17-year-old peasant living in the Lot region of south-western France, is rejected by the French Resistance. Pro-German collaborators obtain information from him about a resistance leader and recruit him into the "Milice Francaise", a fascist group that hunts down Resistance fighters.
In France during the German occupation, a young German naval officer is killed in Paris by a group of leftist activists. The compliant Vichy government seeks to appease the Germans by locating the perpetrators and agreeing to the execution of six people, and a special section is set up for this purpose. The section consists of judges who are too ambitious, cowardly or inhuman to refuse such work. The flames of totalitarianism must be stoked, even with innocent blood, and it is especially convenient to the government if the accused are thoroughly expendable in their eyes.