The story of how an uneducated couple began a quiet resistance against the Nazi regime is based on the real story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who ran an unsophiscated campaign of dropping postcards containing subversive content around Berlin. While the final fate for the couple is quite obvious right from the start (spoiler alert: it isn’t a happy ending), the novel is full of surprises, as it follows Gestapo Inspector Escherich’s hunt of the postcards writer as well as other minor characters, who try to survive (or fail to survive) the terrible situation.