'I'm a TV expert - tear-jerking WWII documentary on BBC is best I've ever seen'

In Tony Trackman's The Last Musician Of Auschwitz, we hear the testimony of the oldest surviving member of the Auschwitz Orchestra, 99-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch - a woman whose talent for the cello saw her saved from an otherwise certain death. She was selected by the Nazis to become an entertainer at the camps, but was terrified to play a single note wrong, shuddering later: "The moment they don't want music, you go to the gas chambers."

The sounds gave newcomers the deceptive impression that nothing was wrong, but the musicians were hiding a dark secret: amid the triumphant notes they were playing, they could smell the stench of burning bodies from the furnaces. Slowly but surely, they'd realised the truth - that everyone who marched past them was destined for death. One night, a survivor recalled that several thousand people arrived at the camp - but by the next day, every single one had disappeared, never to be seen again.

The gas chambers could process around 28,000 people a week, with the end result being the loss of six million Jews in one of the most horrifying wartime tragedies of all time.

Survivors like Anita remember the sick irony and the painstakingly premeditated sadism of infamous SS physician Josef Mengele, who would order them to play Robert Schumann's 'Traumerei (Scenes From Childhood)' about kids' idyllic lives, as he rounded Jewish children up for medical experiments.

They were mutilated, sterilised or blinded as chemical dyes were injected into their eyes to change their colour, while he even tried to artificially create "Siamese twins" - and all the while, tunes about perfect childhood played in the background.

Anita shuddered as she recalled: "The things they have done... Satan would be envious."

In my view, this is the most authentic film about the Holocaust ever made, for numerous reasons: firstly, we hear real-life testimony from survivors like Anita, alongside actress contributions portraying her as a young woman, at the age she was when the atrocities took place.

We hear from the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, who perform moving renditions of Jewish songs passed down to them, created secretly by their ancestors as a form of resistance against the German music that had been imposed on them.

Viewers will also see world-class musicians, including Anita's son, performing in front of the concentration camps where imprisoned Jews had played the exact same songs over 80 years earlier.

The exact same scenes are recreated, but this time with a powerful message of resistance from survivors and a new backdrop of liberation from captors.

Then, for an added layer of authenticity, the film was even recorded through the lenses of an actual Holocaust-era woman, who produced them under the confines of Nazi house arrest.

They were returned to the Germans when she was transported to Auschwitz and brutally murdered - but director Toby was able to source the original lenses.

We also see footage of emaciated dead bodies, and discover that those who came to liberate the remaining survivors found people starving and traumatised to the point of zombification, staring back at them with blank, expressionless eyes - and they were so weak from malnutrition that they could scarcely crawl out of the camps.

It was far from the moment of victory and triumph that it should have been, as survivors were forced to totally rebuild their lives.

Towards the end of the film, Anita plaintively demands to know what has been "learnt" from the atrocities - and while I can't answer that question for everyone, I know what should have been learnt: that in any war or conflict, we should pick the side of humanity and stand against the deaths of innocent people without caveats, no matter what group they belong to.

With wars waging around the world, the lesson is yet to be learnt - but survivors' voices haven't stopped teaching us, with Anita being living proof of that, while their descendants bring their stories back to life through song.

The Last Musician Of Auschwitz comes to British cinemas this month - and it's not one you should miss.