“With schools, restaurants and hotels closed and with border crossing restrictions, we do not expect to return to normal attendance,” museum spokesman Bartosz Bartyzel was cited as saying by state news agency PAP.
Museums and art galleries around Poland will be allowed to reopen from February 1, officials said on Thursday amid signs of a let-up in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Auschwitz museum said that in 2019 it had around 2.3 million visitors, while in 2020 that number dropped to around 502,000 amid the pandemic.
On Wednesday, the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, as well as Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviet POWs and people of many other nationalities, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau before it was liberated by Soviet soldiers on January 27, 1945.
It operated in German-occupied southern Poland between May 1940 and January 1945 and was the largest of the German Nazi concentration and death camps.
Meanwhile, a report has warned that attempts to distort historical facts pose a critical threat to Holocaust memory and to fostering a world without genocide.
(jh/pk)
Source: PAP, Reuters