After the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz won the Nobel prize for literature in 2002, his little-known 1975 novel Fatelessness, about his own childhood deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was filmed, with a script by Kertesz himself. Although it lacked the book’s eerie meditations on the nature of fate and personal responsibility it made a disturbing and unsettling film.

The narrator speaks of his “favourite time” of day in the concentration camp, and when he finally returns home to Budapest and a fractured family, he seems almost nostalgic for the recent past. A man on a tram asks him whether he saw the gas chambers with his own eyes, prefiguring the denial that was to come.

I saw the film at the Jewish film festival in London a couple of years ago. I don’t believe it ever received a general release in Britain and the very faint mark it made will soon be obliterated by a new film about the death camps, a Miramax/Disney production of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a bestselling children’s book published in 2006.

Both cinema and literature have struggled making art from the Holocaust. It is only in the past 15 years that mainstream cinema has regarded the events as sufficiently distant in time to constitute entertainment. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the camps, artists understood that they had nothing to offer that could better straightforward documentary realism. The photographer George Rodger, who covered the liberation of Belsen, noticed that in pointing his camera at the piles of emaciated corpses he was artistically framing his shot. He put the camera down and resolved never to cover war again. From the 1950s onwards, the gold standard account of the camps was Primo Levi’s memoir, If This Is a Man.

In Europe, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) both wrestled with the Holocaust, but fell back on newsreel footage. Only Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) attempted inexpertly to explore the themes of guilt and complicity. It was Hollywood – with the exception of Steven Spielberg – that for decades ignored the Holocaust, the very town that anti-semites were always complaining was controlled by Jews.

Child-centred depictions of the Final Solution, such as Roberto Benigni’s comedy Life Is Beautiful (1999), coat a veneer of sweetness over a horror that you can’t get too close to without being personally scorched. A million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis, but it is the very innocence of children that sentimentalises the subject, and draws the mind away from the moral complexity of the many questions the Final Solution raises. Pimps, prostitutes, adulterers, thieves, embezzlers and the more mildly and mundanely unpleasant went into the gas chambers, as well as the concert pianists and the talented teenage writers. We don’t get any films about them.

I saw a press screening of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas earlier this month. The critics sat in stunned silence at the end and some were still there when the credits had finished rolling. It is impossible to write about the film’s impact without the final spoiler. It relates the story of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commander of an Auschwitz-like death camp, who is removed from his comfortable Berlin home, where he and his friends run around the streets, arms spread, playing Luftwaffe pilots. Relocated to a house in the countryside on the edge of what he first believes to be a large farm, he is deprived of friends to play with and defies his parents’ express orders, haring off through the woods where he comes up short against a barbed wire fence and Shmuel, a boy his own age on the other side, thin, miserable and wearing striped pyjamas.

Over several months the boys become friends, in a static sort of way, talking through the wire. At home, there is Nazi ideology for breakfast, dinner and tea, and a sister with pin-ups of Hitler on the wall, mooning over a blond Aryan lieutenant. A Jewish servant in the house, who lives in the camp, gets bludgeoned to death when he accidentally knocks a glass of red wine on a snowy tablecloth. Shmuel is sent in to clean wine glasses for a party. Bruno gives him a piece of cake. The cruel lieutenant accuses Shmuel of stealing it. Bruno is too frightened of him to disagree. But then he peers over the staircase at a screening of a propaganda film about the camp – life is lovely in there, so Shmuel can’t be that hungry.

Eventually Bruno accepts Shmuel’s invitation to go on an adventure beyond the fence. Changing into striped pyjamas, he burrows under the wire and they run about a bit, until Bruno asks to go the cafeteria he’s seen in his father’s propaganda film. But before he can scamper back home, there is a selection. An entire hut is herded into the gas chamber. The two boys die, holding hands as Bruno’s father, arriving too late, screams in the rain outside.

Is any of this plausible? The book describes itself, under the title, as a parable, and John Boyne – who wrote the source novel and worked on the screenplay – appends the obligatory device of enlarging its meaning so we are to view it as a warning about what is happening today. Is the fence of the book analogous to Israel’s “separation barrier”? It’s easy for parents and teachers to draw attention to the connection if they so wish. Critics were complimentary about Boyne’s novel but one children’s writer expressed concerns: “I simply didn’t believe in the innocence of the hero,” she told me. “There is no way the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer wouldn’t know at least something of what was going on in Berlin and later on in the camp. I didn’t buy Shmuel’s ignorance about the fate of the camp’s inmates.”

When I watched the film, my attention was drawn away from the unintentional death of the innocent Nazi child in the gas chamber to the extras without speaking parts, the grown-up men and women standing around him. The enforced identification with Bruno as an innocent victim of a taste for exciting adventures left a sour taste in my mouth. He isn’t in the camp long enough for him to be lost, swallowed up inside the system. At the point of death, he still thinks they’re sheltering from the rain. Nothing at all disturbs his innocence. The true horror would have been the child’s gradual starvation, the narrow moral choices open to the camp inmates, reduced to stealing a smaller child’s spoon to eat and live. He has a mercifully quick death.The film begins as a glossy, teatime BBC drama serial, with vintage motors and smart 1940s hats, but it ends in a very unexpected place for Holocaust films, with no happy ending. I can think of no other Holocaust film that takes you inside the gas chamber without the narrow escape for its about-to-be murdered inhabitants. But during the rest of the film, the camp is largely peripheral to the main action. Equally implausibly, Bruno’s grandmother is a dissident. His mother, when she understands what is taking place on the other side of the fence, becomes distraught and wants to take the children back to Berlin. We can read her moral position on her face: she stops wearing lipstick.

This is a Hollywood version of the Holocaust, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is literally a Disneyfication (you wonder whether The Gas Chamber ride is being installed outside Paris). When you make films about the Final Solution for children there’s not much you can say other than to introduce the historical events in a palatable way, and to make a general lesson about being nice to other people. When The Diary of Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in the 1950s, it was with the intention of suppressing the specifically Jewish element of the story to make it “universal”.

Imre Kertesz shocked interviewers by saying he felt lucky to have been in Auschwitz: “I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp. You cannot imagine what it’s like to be allowed to lie in the camp’s hospital, or to have a 10-minute break from indescribable labour. To be very close to death is also a kind of happiness. Just surviving becomes the greatest freedom of all.”

The true lessons of the Holocaust remain with us today, largely unexplored, buried beneath hypocrisy and our own perpetual naivety about the nature and consequences of suffering. When Kertesz went on his first visit to Israel, watching tanks roll into the West Bank, he remarked, “I’d rather the star was on the tank than on my chest.”

We are ourselves too childlike to understand much of the great opaque experience of the Final Solution, with only occasional windows breaking through the stone walls of history. How can we expect children to understand what we do not?—Dawn/ Guardian News Service