A powerful and true story comes from the testimony of 12 Serbian POWs. In the turbulence of World War II Germany, hunger for life turns a young POW into a traitor to his countrymen, but love and sacrifice makes him a hero in this elegant tale of defiance by two people in love in the time of horror.

"Everything chimerical that I have heard from a distance has become real, tangible, and so close. - And yet, still so distant. Imponderable. Immaterial. That is music. The heartbeat that nurtures us in our mothers’ wombs. The sounds of birth and death."

The Artisan presents itself as a fictional memoir written in the early 1990s by Timo Tomi to his American son, who has just joined Doctors Without Borders to assist during the conflict in Yugoslavia. Timo, a finish carpenter drafted into the Royal Yugoslav Army in May 1940, is taken prisoner when Yugoslavia collapses. Transported to Germany, he longs to return to his family farm, where his partially disabled father, mother, wife, and new daughter must struggle to manage without him. Only by accepting work - helping to build Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, painting a bread factory, and loading cannon shells onto train cars in a munitions factory - can he hope to get enough food to survive.

While rebuilding the village church’s bell tower, Timo falls in love with the voice of the young teacher, Hanna Gottfried, a former opera star married to an SS colonel serving on the Eastern Front. Surrounded by violence, atrocities, and war crimes, mutual feelings of respect and admiration begin to flourish between the two young people.