Ravensburger Die letzen Kinder von Schewenborn

Gudrun Pausewang was born in 1928 as the oldest of six children in Wichstadtl (East Bohemia). Her father died in Russia in 1943, and her mother had to flee to the West with her six children alone at the end of the war. Gudrun Pausewang worked as a teacher at various schools in Germany and Central and South America. She has taught in Chile, Venezuela, and Colombia. In 1972, two years after the birth of her son, she finally returned to Germany. Here she taught at a primary school in Hesse until 1989. In retirement, she completed her German studies and received her doctorate in 1998 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. Gudrun Pausewang has been a writer since 1958. She has published, in addition to novels for adults, numerous books for children and young people, in which her own experiences and her concern about poverty in South America, the fate of refugees, and the nuclear threat are reflected. In her books, she is committed to peace, the environment, and social justice. An important topic is also the examination of National Socialism and the Third Reich. She has received several awards for her literary work, including the 1988 German Youth Literature Prize for "The Cloud." In 1999, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, and in 2009, she received the Grand Prize of the German Academy for Children's and Youth Literature Volkach for her life's work.

"When we drove through Lanthen, everything was still the same. But in the forest, just in the curve at the Kalden field, it suddenly flashed so brightly that we had to squeeze our eyes. My mother let out a scream, and my father stepped on the brakes so hard that the tires squeaked. As soon as the car was standing, we saw in the sky, behind the treetops, a blinding light, white and terrible, like the light of a giant welding torch or a flash that doesn't go away. I just looked in for a moment. Nevertheless, I was blind for quite a while after that.".