The other characters are easier to classify as good and evil. That said, Doerr never lets Werner off the hook, and Werner’s arc - his increasing tolerance for ugliness and violence, “his ten thousand small betrayals,” his struggle to find volition and redemption in a life that offers few apparent choices - is the most compelling part of the book. We are meant to identify with Werner as he slips into his useful role within the Wehrmacht, and perhaps it was better to have him take out enemy combatants than innocent Jewish children. Despite the time frame, Doerr largely avoids the topic of the Holocaust, focusing more on warfare than on genocide. The bulk of the novel takes place between 19, with particular focus on the siege of Saint-Malo in August 1944, where the two stories finally converge. His talent for radio repair attracts attention to his genius, and he leaves Zollverein for a Hitler Youth academy, then for a special assignment that uses mathematical methods to track and destroy the Resistance. Werner lives in claustrophobic fear of his fated existence, and when he sees a ticket out, he seizes it. The orphanage boys have one known destiny - to go straight to the mines when they turn 15. He grows up with his little sister in the orphanage of Zollverein, a 4,000-acre coal-mining complex, where their father died in an accident underground. Werner Pfennig serves as the corresponding boy to Marie-Laure’s girl - a young orphan with a scientist’s mind and all the grim opportunities available to a brilliant youth in Nazi Germany. Van Rumpel, who is dying of cancer, becomes fixated with the Sea of Flames, which is rumored to protect its owner from death while drawing disaster on his or her loved ones. The stone attracts the attention of the novel’s primary antagonist, Nazi Sergeant Major van Rumpel, a treasure collector for the Third Reich. They carry with them a 133-carat stone that is either the Sea of Flames, the museum’s most valuable diamond, or one of three convincing replicas. When she is 12, the Germans occupy Paris, and she and her father flee to Saint-Malo, a walled city on the Brittany coast, where her great-uncle owns a six-story home he hasn’t left since the last World War.
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