While the story is entirely fictional, Pausewang confirmed in the book's epilogue that she created its main setting, the small town of Schewenborn, in the image of Schlitz in East Hesse, where she herself used to live.

During the course of the next few months, it becomes clear that Frankfurt, Berlin and major German cities, as well as the adjacent Netherlands and Czechoslovakia were also targeted, given the arrival of seriously burnt and radiation-scarred refugees from those areas.

One by one, members of Roland Bennewitz' family, including his new foster-siblings, birth sisters, younger brother, mother and a severely impaired newborn sibling, die of radiation sickness, childbirth and uncontrollable epidemic disease given the absence of food and medicine, as do the village's other surviving adult inhabitants, orphaning any consequent children born after the nuclear holocaust.

By the end of the book, only Roland, his father, and a small group of boys and girls who represent the titular last children remain alive, and the final paragraphs suggest that they, too, will perish, given the prevalence of cancer, uncurable pandemic disease, food shortages and nuclear fallout in the post-apocalyptic environment.

[1] The book is written as a cautionary tale in its clear intent to deliver a stern warning to both civilians and world leaders, similar to other dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature.