Winter on the Eastern Front © | #Wattys2026

«Trench 117 doesn't exist in the records, but it existed in us.»

In the final months of World War II, in the heart of the Eastern Front, a group of German soldiers was condemned to utter oblivion. Trapped in a trench that official maps ignored and that winter buried under tons of ice, these men were not defeated by the enemy, but by the indifference of history.

Eighty years later, the chance discovery of a notebook in an antique shop unearths a truth that someone, somewhere in a position of power, fought to erase. Through the chronicles of Friedrich Albrecht Keller-the last survivor-we discover the descent into a hell where the cold not only destroys flesh, but also erases identity. As Friedrich writes from a room guarded by silence, desperately trying to cling to his own existence, a historian in the present begins to piece together the puzzle of a phantom unit that should never have been remembered.

Winter on the Eastern Front is a psychological drama about the weight of memory versus the will to forget. It is the story of a man who refuses to disappear and of a truth that, though buried under the snow, continues to beat beneath the weight of a century of silence.

«I don't write to remember. I write to endure.»

«I was the last to die.»

«My name is Friedrich Albrecht Keller.»

«Everything else was buried under the snow.»