AN old brown suitcase made of cardboard is at the centre of an unprecedented legal battle between the son of its former owner and the museum commemorating him and fellow inmates at Auschwitz.

Most people who found a faded suitcase in the attic would probably consider it worthless, but for Michel Levi-Leleu, the Frenchman claiming the relic, it is beyond price.

He last saw the suitcase on April 10, 1943. It was in the hands of Pierre Levi-Leleu, his father, when he left his wife, daughter and son in a safe house in Savoy as he tried to find another refuge.

He was arrested in Avignon and taken by the Nazis to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in occupied Poland. There he died along with more than 1m other European Jews, gypsies, Polish dissidents and others deemed undesirable by the Third Reich.

“My father had changed his Jewish name from Levi to Leleu in the hope of saving himself, but it did not help,” said Levi-Leleu, who is now 66 but was three when he last saw his father. “They must have allowed him to take the suitcase with him when he was deported.”

Little is known of his father’s fate after his arrest. Documents recovered from the former concentration camp show that he arrived in occupied Poland on July 31, 1943. Apart from this record and the suitcase, nothing remains to tell of his imprisonment and ultimate death.

In 1945 the authorities informed Levi-Leleu’s family that he had been recognised as someone who had “lost his life for France”. His family never knew the suitcase had been recovered, or that it had turned up as an exhibit at the Auschwitz Holocaust museum in southern Poland.

It has been on display there since the museum was opened two years after the war. It would probably have remained in Poland had curators not decided to break with tradition in September 2005, when they allowed several items with links to French victims to be borrowed by the Shoah memorial centre in Paris.

The loan was expected to be short-term, yet when the other exhibits returned to Poland, the suitcase remained in Paris after it had been spotted by Levi- Leleu. “I could not believe it when I saw it,” he said. “I looked at a small tag attached to the suitcase and could even see my father’s name on it, together with a printed inscription reading ‘86 Boul. Vilette, Paris’ (his original address).”

On closer inspection he also found a handwritten label reading: “Pierre Levi — 48 Gruppe 10”, his prisoner reference.

He asked the organisers of the exhibition to hand over the suitcase. When they refused he started legal proceedings in Paris, sending in bailiffs to impound the suitcase until the court could settle its ownership.

Eight months after it should have returned to Poland, the suitcase is still in Paris. According to the memorial centre, it will remain there until the court case is concluded next month.

The Auschwitz museum does not deny that Levi-Leleu’s father once owned the suitcase, and indeed argues the fact that he can be identified as the owner is the reason why it should remain in its hands.

“The suitcases of prisoners deported to Auschwitz that are exhibited at the museum are among the most valuable objects that we have,” the museum states in court papers.

“These items are of huge importance if the names of their owners can still be seen, as there are only a very small number of these. They are concrete proof that real people who can be identified and portrayed died in the camp.”

The lawsuit is the first where a descendant of a Holocaust victim has demanded that an item be returned to the family. Museum officials fear that it could set a precedent.

In a prepared statement the museum said: “We want to express our deepest understanding for the emotions of the families of the victims of the Shoah. However, the remains of these victims should remain intact at the museum. Their memory and their possessions are inseparable, and this must be the legal basis for the museum’s position in this tragic story.”

Every year some 500,000 people visit the Auschwitz museum. There they can see the former prisoners’ barracks crammed with shoes, suitcases and household utensils taken from them by the Nazis.

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