A suitcase in dispute

This seems to me a difficult one to call:

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.

The suitcase has been on display in the Auschwitz museum since shortly after the end of World War II; it was spotted by the son, Michel Levi-Leleu, while on loan to the Shoah memorial centre in Paris.

Levi-Leleu obviously has a moral claim on the suitcase. But so, I would think, does the Auschwitz museum, though its claim is not well-stated by the museum itself:

"The suitcases of prisoners deported to Auschwitz that are exhibited at the museum are among the most valuable objects that we have...

"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."

This argument seems to me to make a concession to Holocaust-deniers that shouldn't be made. There's no shortage of evidence for the process of organized industrial murder that took place at Auschwitz, and the availability or otherwise of Levi-Leleu's father's suitcase, or indeed of a number of such suitcases, doesn't make a significant difference to that state of affairs. It's a bit like the misguided notion that once all the Holocaust survivors, the direct witnesses of what happened in the death camps, have died, things will be more difficult in combating Holocaust denial. But there is no more difficulty with regard to the reality of the Holocaust than there is with regard to the reality of any other major historical event. There is a mountain and more of documentary evidence for it and of recorded eyewitness testimony.

If the Auschwitz museum also has a claim on the suitcase, as I think it does, it's simply that the suitcase has become a sort of public document - a historical relic that has educational value. Arguably it can do more good in a commemorative museum. But can this override the son's entitlement? Perhaps not. I'm glad I don't have to adjudicate the issue.