Directed and written for the screen by England’s Mark Herman, Irish writer John Boyne’s fifth novel, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, has won adult and children’s book awards, fulfilling his aim to respect history, yet “find new ways of telling this story to reach a new audience.” Holocaust films are learning that story trumps horrific historical footage and that individual interacting characters can make more of an impact than reels of liberation coverage and statistics impossible to digest.

With Budapest as Berlin, and Hungary’s “Children’s City” orphanage plus an old John Huston set for rural locations, the film is different, for it’s seen through the wide blue German eyes of an eight-year-old. Young Bruno (Asa Butterfield) transforms troubling impressions into the games of a boy, from arms-outspread Messerschmitt fighters through leather soccer balls and knights in tales of chivalry, to a disguised search-and-find mission, his misapprehension of realities resulting in pieces of ironic, sad humor distinct from the purposeful distortions of a father shielding his son in Life Is Beautiful.

A child Christ figure, to suffer for man’s sins, Bruno never wises up. His mother Elsa (Vera Farmiga) does, however, more than in the original book. This model officer’s wife and mother chooses not to see what surrounds her family, embodying thus many citizens of das Vaterland and of the Allies. Elsa and extermination camp commandant husband Ralph (David Thewlis) mirror his parents, a bourgeois Grandpa (Richard Johnson) who swallows the state’s war and race propaganda and its documentary film about happy internment camps while Grandma (Sheila Hancock) veils in double-entendre what she (and most everyone) knows before she pays the price for non-action.

Commendable in not following the tradition of fake German accents, the film allows its British speakers to breathe naturally, with American Farmiga blending in. Restrained in its sight (and smell) of black smoke from crematoria chimneys, it relies a bit easily on the living wood and gaiety of the capital house and garden contrasted to the austere black metal and grey headquarters house with its yard of stones to which father and family are promoted.

Older by four years, sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) thrives under their private Party-line tutor (Jim Norton, as Herr Liszt), develops a crush on spit-and-polish Lt. Kotler (Rupert Friend), puts away childish things  -- naked rubber dolls discarded in the basement strike a shivery note of heaped concentration camp corpses -- and dresses and posters her room after the Hitler Youth. Mother is distressed but suppressed, and friendless bored Boris passes a verboten gate and woods to the “farm” seen from his upstairs window before it got boarded over.

Through barbed wire, he happily becomes friends with odd-named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), also eight, whose mother is not mentioned and whose grandparents died in the camp “hospital.” With bad or missing upper teeth and a shaved head, the Jewish boy pauses for rest hidden by concrete debris and is not much more aware of the situation than this new Aryan playmate who comes with toy airplanes, balls, tennis rackets and stolen cakes for him. Father, sister, grandpa, lieutenant and tutor spout the stuff of Nazi superiority, but, clad in the same vertically striped numbered “pajamas” as Shmuel, former doctor now forced laborer Pavel (David Hayman) is gentle with Bruno.

SPOILER ALERT

When Shmuel is ordered into the house, too, the friends are discovered by Kotler while the prisoner is wolfing down sweets urged on him by his companion. A terrified Bruno denies all complicity.

Gretel and Bruno are frightened by shouting and tension between their parents, father defending his military duties in building a better, purer civilization, and mother so losing her delicate grip. Guilty about having denied his new friend in fear, the German boy crosses under the fence to help Shmuel find his disappeared father. What excites the boys in a Tom Sawyer adventure turns to quick tragedy -- a sudden black thunderstorm is too pat -- for although both Twain’s and Boyne’s are works of fiction, this film is more nakedly the realm of adult atrocity not masked by authorial irony.

Innocence lost or corrupted or slaughtered, a tale older than Scripture and as today as war and genocide, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas contrasts love to hatred, good to evil, children to parents and other adults. The vantage point is that of Bruno, and it is our outside hindsight of what he sees and cannot conceptualize that imparts unrelieved darkness to what once was shiny Eden.

(Released by Miramax Films and rated “PG-13” for some mature thematic material including the Holocaust.)