A huge amount of money is needed to preserve Auschwitz as a memorial site. In the video here Pawel Sawicki explains some of the problems involved.
There is an interesting debate about what to do with Auschwitz, between historian Robert Jan Van Pelt, an expert on the camp, and former Polish Foreign Minister (himself once an inmate) Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. Van Pelt's view is that, when the last Auschwitz survivor has passed on, the camp should be left to decay and be covered by 'grass, roots and brambles'. His central argument for this appears to be that it is ineffective as a memorial:
[T]hese remains do not reveal the wartime reality of "endless, uninterrupted fear". The barracks offer no more than "the shell, the shadow".
Bartoszewski responds by saying that only those murdered there have 'a full and undeniable right' to decide the future of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial. He goes on:
The ruins of crematoria and gas chambers in Birkenau, the empty bunks in barracks, the dark cells in Block 11 and the Wall of Death - all of them will cry out. Therefore, it is meaningful to save stones, ruins, and buildings, even if the price is high.
Personally, I lean towards Bartoszewski's view. Not because of the right he claims for the dead victims: they cannot now decide on the future of Auschwitz, and it is not relevant, consequently, to speak of their having a right to do so. But to me, Van Pelt's argument looks like a version of what is a common theme in the study and the literature of the Shoah: namely, that there can be no wholly successful mode of communicating the experience of the death camps to those who were not there. There can't be, that is true. But we do the best we can, and we have to do it. Therefore the ruins may be preserved - to 'cry out', as much as they can cry out; just as survivor testimony, the acts of witness by Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Jean Améry and countless others, the scholarship and drama and other art coming out of the catastrophe cry out as best they can. All of it will inevitably fall short of the reality it tells about. But so it must, and we should be thankful that it does. The only way of fully recapturing that reality would be to repeat it.
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. To 'give them an eternal name...'