The Last Brother

Nine-year-old Raj has no idea that there is a war. He has other worries - he has lost two brothers, his father is a tyrant and a drunkard. Raj tries to keep his eyes off him and wanders off. The local jail attracts him like a magnet. Who are those strange people behind that high wall? What have they done, are they dangerous? And then his gaze meets the boy's, like himself; he could be his brother, but he's so different. The black-haired and swarthy Raj was born in Mauritius, David is a Jewish boy from Prague with angelic blond curls. Their fateful meeting occurs on the island of Mauritius, where in 1940 the Atlantic ship arrived with about 1500 Jewish refugees from Central Europe, several hundred of whom came from the former Czechoslovakia. The British authorities, for political and tactical reasons, did not allow them to remain in Palestine, where they had almost reached after great hardship, but set up an internment camp for them in an old prison in Mauritius. There has been violence and injustice that would like to be forgotten. Raj also tried to forget, but as a man in his seventies, he lets the memory of his last brother, David, come back to him. In magical language, Nathacha Appanah recalls a cruel, almost unknown part of the history of our Western civilization, seen through the eyes of a child.