“One Life” is an inspiring drama about efforts to save refugee children — mostly Jewish — from Czechoslovakia in the months leading into World War II.

It’s a meandering if sometimes moving story of asserting one’s humanity and appealing to Britain’s “commitment to decency and kindness and respect for others” that strains to assert its relevence in an anti-refugee era in Britain and much of the West.

And it’s a Holocaust drama overswept by events in Gaza which threaten the usage if not the very meaning of “Save one life and save the world entire.”

Anthony Hopkins plays Nicholas “Nicky” Winton, a British retiree nagged by his wife (Lena Olin) into getting rid of the lifetime of clutter, files and such he’d accumulated over the decades, cluttering several rooms of their house by the late ’80s.

A volunteer at non-profits, even in his dotage, Nicky flashes back to his pre-World War II actions as he’s rounding up files about work that had nothing to do with his lifelong labors as a London stock broker.

Back then, Nicky Winton — Johnny Flynn plays him as a young man — reads news accounts and rushes to Czechoslovakia, whose Sudentenland has been ceded to Hitler to save the peace, an action that dooms families that fled Germany and Austria, many of them Jewish.

“I have to do something,” he tells his almost-disapproving mother (Helena Bonham Carter).

And once there, he joins a British refugee rescue operation already organizing family evacuations. He takes note of the looming winter of ’38, the neediness of the hundreds of children he encounters and all of a sudden, London’s stock index doesn’t seem so important.

“I have seen this, and I cannot unsee it.”

“One Life” is a seriously conventional drama about the logistics of getting children out of a war zone with the only escape route a train ride through hostile Germany itself, and through Holland, “which has closed its borders to Jewish refugees.”

British bureaucracy must be confronted. That’s where Nicky’s Mum (Bonham Carter) makes her “commitment to decency and kindness” appeal. National attention must be obtained via the press, funds raised.

And wary Czechs and a Prague rabbi must be persuaded that Winton — whose family had just changed its Germanic name to avoid problems in the U.K.– means them no harm, that he’s not stealing their children and helping “end” Judaism in Central Europe by his actions.

The acting is good (Romola Garai is a fiery, no-nonsense aid worker), the suspense not quite as suspenseful as one would hope and the earnestness exactly what we’ve come to expect from the many movies about versions of Oskar Schindler-like figures saving the most prominent victim group of the Holocaust, Europe’s Jews.

“You’ve done enough!”

“It’s never enough, is it?”

The movie’s third act is wholly about how this forgotten story came back to light, and while it is moving, it’s ungainly, and as generic as much of what’s come before.

You’d like to think people the world over, from Islington to Illinois and even Israel, would have absorbed the lessons from history’s darkest hour, that we wouldn’t need reminding with periodic updating of a story that’s often been told in movies just like “One Life.”

And then you watch the news about refugees facing life-or-death barriers to safer lives almost everywhere, and “ethnic cleansing,” a genocide with a neater, Serbian-inspired name going on in the last large piece of Palestine left to its native inhabitants, and you realize that repeating “Never forget” and “Never again” is never going to be enough, especially if the people saying it are using it to deflect criticism from their own crimes.

Rating: PG

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Johnny Flynn, Jonathan Pryce and Helena Bonham Carter.

Credits: Directed by James Hawes, scripted by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, based on a book by Barbara Winton. A Bleecker Street release.

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