Similarly , Tom Wilkinson is taller and bulkier than Richard Rampton , the defence barrister , but went some way towards capturing his scholarly demeanour and his rhetorical clarity . The scene in the movie where Rampton goes to see Deborah Lipstadt in her London hotel room is entirely invented , but is part of the movie ’ s ( largely successful ) effort to give the characters a more human dimension than would be possible if the film had been largely confined to the courtroom . Rampton was indeed genuinely moved in many different ways by the case , in particular by the contrast between the appalling sufferings of the Holocaust victims , and the callous appearance presented by Irving ’ s denialism .
Movies can ’ t afford to have too many characters or it becomes impossible in a two-hour or slightly over two-hour performance to give depth to any of them , so the other expert witnesses , testifying to the actual evidence for the Holocaust that Irving was alleged to have falsified , and to Irving ’ s ties to extreme right-wing politics , were cut out of the picture . On the other hand , there were some new characters too , including a friend of Lipstadt ’ s in whom she confides her feelings about the action , and a Holocaust survivor , Vera Reich , played by Harriet Walter , inventions that serve to dramatise the issues in a directly human way .
There were in fact quite a few Holocaust survivors in the courtroom ’ s public gallery , who had turned up their shirtsleeves to reveal the Auschwitz
tattoo numbers on their forearms ; the character of Vera Reich is a way of pointing up the fact that the defence decided early on not to call any survivors into the witness box even though some , represented by Vera , did indeed demand to be heard . Subjecting elderly people to a man , Irving , who claimed not to believe their experiences were real , and who would pounce , as he had done on other occasions , on the slightest lapse of memory to try and discredit them , would not have been ethical ; but more importantly , the trial , unlike the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem decades before , which had relied heavily on survivor testimony , was not , as already noted , about whether the Holocaust had happened , but about whether Irving was a right-wing extremist who falsified the historical record of the Holocaust , and hearing survivor testimony would have taken attention away from this central focus on the claimant , undermining the defence case in the process .
Denial is very good at explaining clearly and convincingly both the peculiarities of English libel law , where in effect the defendant has to prove innocence rather than the claimant having to prove the defendant ’ s guilt , which would seem on the face of it to be more just , and the thrust of the defence ’ s strategy , which demanded that Lipstadt herself remain silent throughout the trial , despite the fact that she was desperate to speak in her own defence . As her solicitor Anthony Julius explains , putting her in the witness box would have taken the heat
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3 . In her famous book , Deborah Lipstadt shows how this irrational idea not only has continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement | Penguin Books
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4 . David Irving taken in London , 2012 | Allan warren , CC BY-SA 3.0 , Wikimedia Commons
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Observing Memories Issue 5