Years later, an elderly Vianne remembers these experiences and attends an event in her sister’s honor. Isabelle spends the remainder of the war in a Nazi prison camp, and she dies shortly after being freed. Claiming to be the Nightingale, her estranged father, Julien, rescues her but is executed in her place. Isabelle is captured by the Nazis and interrogated. When the Holocaust puts Vianne’s Jewish best friend’s son at risk, she adopts the boy and begins forging false identity papers for other Jewish children so they can be hidden in the local Catholic orphanage. For her work, she adopts the codename the Nightingale.

Isabelle, who refuses to live passively under German authority, joins the French resistance movement and begins guiding Allied airmen out of France after their planes are shot down. Vianne continues to follow the rules even when it means allowing a Nazi officer to live in her home and the abuse and arrest of her Jewish neighbors. The Nazi invasion of France heightens these differences. Vianne, the older sister, is a rule-follower, whereas Isabelle is rebellious and speaks her mind. Since their mother died when they were children, Vianne and Isabelle have always been at odds. Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale tells the story of Vianne (Rossignol) Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol, two French sisters who resist the occupying Nazi forces during World War II (WWII) by hiding Jewish children so they are not taken to concentration camps (the Holocaust) and by leading the escape of Allied pilots whose planes have been shot down over France.

The nightingale hannah