The Last Children | Gudrun Pausewang | Walker Books Limited

This is the English translation of the German novel by Gudrun Pausewang, originally published in 1983 as Die letzen Kinder von Schewenborn.  It tells the story from the perspective of Roland, a 12-year old boy, who was in an annual visit with his family to visit his maternal grandparents in Schewenborn.

The story didn't explicit spell out initially that a nuclear bomb was detonated over Fulda, when Roland and his family were on their way to Schewenborn, yet the description was vivid and immediately recognizable for me as I had visited the Genbaku museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By the end of the story, there still wasn't any closure.  There was no explanation as to what exactly set off the nuclear bomb, or if there was even a war in the first place.  There was never any appearance by the Red Cross or any humanitarian efforts in the aftermath of the nuclear explosion.  It seemed as if the survivors were left to their own devices in a vaccum.  

Reading The Last Children, against the heightened geopolitical situations in different parts of the world makes for really poignant reading.  When I first read The Last Children many years back, it was an incredibly unbelievable book.  The Cold War was history, and it seemed that wars were a faraway concept in Afganistan.  Yet not even a centuary has passed since World War II and the world now seems to be in an incredibly unbelievable situation again.