The story centers on Emmanuelle, a young woman living in a small (fictional) village in Normandy. Before the war, she had apprenticed with a local master baker, Ezra Kuchen, learning to expertly make staples like bread as well as more luxurious delicacies. Emma lives with her widowed father and senile grandmother, she has a beau with whom she is happily contemplating a future, and gainful employment. The German occupation of France changes all of that. Her boyfriend, along with many other of the village young men, is taken away to work in a German munitions factory. Emma's father is accused of being involved with the resistance and arrested, eventually being sent to an internment camp. Ezra, who is Jewish, is at first forced to wear a yellow star to identify him as such; later he is dragged from his shop and murdered by the occupying Nazis before the horrified villagers.
Emma is left alone to care for her grandmother and try to survive the occupation. Food has become extremely scarce because the Nazis have confiscated all of the crops as well as the local fishermen's hauls, etc., and only allot enough rations to the villagers to keep them from starving to death. Because of her skill as a baker Emma is given an extra ration of flour every week, ordered to make twelve loaves of bread for the German troops stationed nearby. Emma discovers a small way to cheat on the order. She grinds up straw into a fine powder and mixes it into the flour given to her for the German bread. It adds no nutrition but extends the flour to make two extra loaves which she then sneaks to hungry villagers each week.
This small act of rebellion leads to others as Emma and the other villagers find little ways to thwart their occupiers and get the things they need to survive. Reluctantly- almost involuntarily- Emma finds herself the central figure in a ramshackle blackmarket where stolen lightbulbs and siphoned gas are traded for fish, eggs, and other necessities. It's a risky business and Emma is fatalistically sure that she will eventually be caught and killed. She's startled to find that, though she lacks any faith that the Germans will be defeated, the petty acts of defiance she and the others are perpetrating have lit a spark of hope in the hearts of many of the villagers.