IT won no Oscar – didn’t even receive a nomination. But, for my money, the film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one of the finest ever made.

I’ve watched it twice. The second time, on BBC2 a fortnight ago, it lost none of its power, even though I knew the plot, with its heartbreaking denouement.

If anything, it gained in impact, not least through the evocation of the untrammelled joy of the German boy, Bruno, in simple pleasures of boyhood – running with outstretched arms to imitate a plane, dashing through a wood slashing at undergrowth with a stick. So innocent – and so much at odds with the sinister world into which he runs.

As you perhaps know, Bruno, son of the commandant of a wartime concentration camp, encounters a Jewish boy of the same age – he of the striped pyjamas – imprisoned in the camp.

Separated by the boundary fence, they nevertheless form a secret friendship, even playing draughts through the wire. But tragedy looms, linked to the camp’s dark purpose.

The climax is almost unbearable to watch, with a frantic search for Bruno, whose mother breaks down uncontrollably. This is the bitter fruit of racial prejudice and denial of our common humanity. And if the actress playing the mother didn’t deserve an Oscar, those playing the two boys did.

The film is prefaced by a quote from John Betjeman: “You and I are as much responsible for these Nazi torture camps as the Germans.”

This is so far from Betjeman’s usual beat that I determined to track it down. It comes in a batch of book reviews by Betjeman published in the Daily Herald newspaper in 1945.

One of the reviews is of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. “As rich in characters as a Dickens novel,” says Betjeman. “The message is that worldly values are not worth having.” Very good. But the review that matters here is of a mere booklet (price 3d) titled What Buchenwald Really Means, by the publisher Victor Gollancz. The Betjeman quote is primarily the author’s, for Betjeman writes: “Mr Gollancz points out that you and I are as much responsible etc…”

But he continues: “We knew about the camps before the war. But whereas you and I could have protested without getting into trouble, Germans could not have done so without going to one of the camps themselves for speaking out against the Nazi Government.”

Since then, the universal call has been: Never again.

So what’s this? In Donetsk, worshippers emerging from the synagogue have been handed leaflets by masked men ordering “citizens of Jewish nationality” to register with the new pro-Russian administration, pay a fee and provide a list of their property and their “family composition.”

The new (pro-Russian) administration denies responsibility. Signalling the mind games that always bedevil any crisis like that in Ukraine, it claims the leaflet could be the work of the Kiev-based government, to discredit the pro-Russian cause.

But Donetsk’s rabbi, Pinchas Vishedski, says: “For us it doesn’t matter who made the leaflet. For us, the terrible fact is that someone made it.”

Yet he insists there is “no Jewish question” in Donetsk. “We are a piece of Donetsk. We are all together.” That’s what The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas unforgettably urges. Hope wants it to be true.