Sergei and Hans

Christmas Eve, 1914. The Carpathian Mountains. A Russian prisoner and a German guard spend one night in a storage cabin on the Eastern Front. By morning, something between them has changed—and neither one can undo it. Sergei is a musician. Before the war, he played in orchards and grand ballrooms. Now he survives on memories of a woman named Anya and the life he lost. His rain-soaked journal is the only proof that life existed at all. Hans is the guard in the tower. A seminary student who never imagined he'd hold a rifle pointed at other men. When he finds Sergei's journal thrown into a fire, he reads it cover to cover—peaches, cherry trees, the small human moments that make a life worth living. On Christmas Eve, in firelight, they share schnapps and soup. For a few hours, they stop being prisoner and guard. They become two men who recognize each other across a divide that was supposed to keep them worlds apart. Sergei and Hans is the first book in the Prayers in the Air series—literary World War I fiction about the quiet, impossible moments of connection that survive when everything else burns away. Each book stands alone.

Dennis Santaniello is a New Jersey–born author who writes novels, screenplays, and essays. His work moves between historical fiction and nonfiction, with a steady interest in how people carry memory, loyalty, and damage through time. His books include Sergei and Hans, a World War I novel set on the Eastern Front, The Conquistadors Trilogy about the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the nonfiction series The Fruits of History, and Dennis At The Movies. He publishes independently and approaches his work with patience, curiosity, and a voice shaped by long years of writing and revisiting the same questions from different angles.