The struggle to find the right way to describe the destruction of European Jewry is sometimes depicted as a contest between history and memory. And so we take refuge in history, in documents, in facts - cool, detached, silent, precise. Thanks to Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers, the facts about the Holocaust are indeed safer - and for that, perhaps, we should be grateful. But witnesses, memories, testimony - all that was left outside the courtroom. And that seems to me cause for regret.
Witnesses are always partial.
Memory is by definition selective. Yet without witnesses, without human voices to put flesh on the facts, we have something that, while it may pass muster as history, can never tell the truth. The Holocaust on Trial is published in May by Granta, price 17.99.