The Last Children
Author: Gudrun Pausewang
Date: 1989-04-15 04:00:00+00:00
Description: It's the beginning of the summer holidays and the Bennewitzs are on their way to visit their grandparents Suddenly there is a blinding light in the sky - nuclear warfare has begun. Suggested level: secondary.
Publisher: MacRae

coffee mill - cooked in water, and without milk or sugar. We had to use salt sparingly, too. It was already getting scarce in town and was valuable for bartering with. For a long time we had been using rock salt. The food didn’t have much
flavour, but we ate anything that was edible.

I’ll never forget the first Christmas Eve after the bomb. In celebration of the event, Mother had opened the door to the living room. It was almost pitch-dark in there, because we had boarded up the windows for the winter and stuffed the cracks with hay and straw. It took a long time for that
large a space to get warm enough for us to sit there
without shivering. Mother splurged and got one of Grandmother’s candles out, a little red one that was left over from the last Christmas. She put it on the table in a wreath made out of pine twigs and lit it. We sat in a circle and gazed into the unaccustomed light. On other evenings all we could
allow ourselves was the glow of the fire from the stove; by seven or eight o’clock we would go to bed. What a wonder-ful light it made, this candle flame! We watched it flickering and listened solemnly to the tinkling of the musical boxes which Mother had taken out of Grandmother’s cabinet. She
wound them up one after another, last of all the new one
that we had brought along to give to Grandmother. Again it tinkled ‘It’s Now or Never’. Jens was awestruck. Later he played with his presents: the teddy bear from the hospital, which had been thoroughly washed, and the puppet that

Mother had crocheted for him using old bits of wool. Father carved him a top. Jens was overjoyed.

But the rest of us couldn’t help thinking about Kerstin
and Judith and Silke and our grandparents. When Father
noticed that Mother was crying, he took her hand and held it tightly. I laid my head in her lap the way I had when I was little and cried, too. But I kept my head under the table-top so that Jens wouldn’t see me. Everyone wanted it to be a
beautiful Christmas for him.

Once the candle had burned down, we had real roast

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