PARIS, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- A French engineer has sued the museum at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland asking that his father's suitcase remain in France.
Michel Levi-Leleu did not realize that his father's case had survived and was on exhibit at Auschwitz until it was sent to Paris with other items for a temporary display at the new Memorial to the Shoah, the Times of London reported. Levi-Leleu's daughter spotted the suitcase marked with her grandfather's name.
Pierre Levi, a former diamond broker, was arrested by French police in 1943 at the Avignon train station. He was in hiding working as a farm laborer and was traveling to see his wife and sons, who had taken the French sounding name of Leleu.
Levi was sent to Auschwitz. Until Michel Levi-Leleu discovered the suitcase he had nothing tangible to remind him of his father.
Levi-Leleu -- who was 5 when his father was deported -- said he does not want the suitcase as a personal possession, but thinks it should be permanently on display at the Paris memorial.
"The case would stay in France as the property of Auschwitz but it would stay in France as powerful symbolic testimony," he said.
