The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has been closed to the public since March 12 due to Coronavirus shutdown and doesn’t expect to reopen fully to the public before the beginning of July.
More than 2.3 million people a year visit Auschwitz, and the Museum Memorial reports that the lack of income brought on by the shutdown — and the expected overall collapse in the number of visitors for the foreseeable future — has created a financing crisis for the institution. Conservation work at the site is not at risk, but all other operations are affected.
In consequence it has launched a public appeal for funding to help.
Over the last few months, we have found ourselves in an unprecedented situation. The budget planned for 2020 has collapsed. Nearly all substantive operations of the Museum have been limited. We have also reduced all investments to the necessary minimum. Thanks to special support from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, we have managed to maintain continuity of the institution and workplace; however, without additional funds, the implementation of our statutory operations is called into question.[…]
It seems that the collapse in attendance will be of a long-term nature. This means we will not be able to finance numerous significant projects related primarily to education and research on the history of Auschwitz – both at the Memorial and online – or publishing or exhibition projects that bring the tragic history of Auschwitz closer to a global audience.
On May 30 and 31, the Museum stage a trial re-opening for visitors. The main goal was to test the new visiting arrangements and format, with new sanitary restrictions in place. Only 400 people were allowed in — less than 3 percent of the number of visitors at the same time last year.
One of these first visitors was the scholar and tour guide Dr. Tomasz Cebulski — he did his PhD on the post-war history of the Nazi death camp as the site of a memorial museum (and recently, a mass tourism site), and he regularly guides visitors both to Auschwitz and on Jewish heritage and genealogy trips in Poland.
In this video, he describes his visit — and how, probably for the first time since it was built, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex is empty.
Tomasz describes new measures and changes in the exhibits:
I was among the first visitors to enter and I was impressed with how professionally they manage the new reality. As for now keeping all those restrictions will be easy as the numbers of people entering are low. Latter some changes and adaptations will be made but the museum proved to be flexible when needed. They don’t let things loose. There are Museum employees reminding people discreetly to wear a mask when inside the blocks or exhibits.
They have made almost the entire permanent exhibit available with blocks number 4, 5,6, 7 and 11 opened. All of the glass cabinet exhibits with documents were removed. The gas chamber and crematorium section in Auschwitz I is also available in a much larger capacity than normal. Everything the Museum did had the creation of more space in mind. Some parts of the exhibit creating narrow passages were just removed.
To make the educational experience more complete and replace for some sections which are still off-limits there were large outdoor exhibition panels installed. Showing pictures and narrating history.