Sergei and Hans

The beginning of the Prayers in the Air series

Christmas Eve, 1914. The Carpathian Mountains. Sergei is a Russian prisoner in a German camp—a musician who once played in orchards and grand ballrooms, now surviving on memories of a woman named Anya and the life he left behind. Hans is the guard in the tower, a seminary student who never imagined he'd end up with a rifle pointed at other men.

When Hans discovers Sergei's rain-soaked journal thrown into a fire, he reads it cover to cover. Page by page, he learns about peaches and cherry trees, about the small human moments that make life worth living, about what it means to stay human when the world demands you become a machine.

On Christmas Eve, in a storage cabin lit only by firelight, something shifts. They share schnapps and soup. For a few hours, they stop being Russian and German, prisoner and guard. They become two men who recognize each other across a barbed wire fence that was supposed to keep them worlds apart.

By morning, one of them will climb that fence. The other will have his rifle ready.