One definition of irony is that it is an outcome of events that is contrary to what would be expected. The story is ironic in this sense.
In 1958, AM Rosenthal of the New York Times visited Auschwitz and filed the story you refer to.
The whole point of his story is that Auschwitz, which was once the site of one of the greatest horrors of the 20th century, was such an unimportant place just thirteen years later.
When Rosenthal got there, what he saw was children playing and sunlight on the poplars and not much else -- nothing going on. How could that be in a place where something so important had happened?
As Rosenthal says
And so there is no news to report about Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would somehow be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died here
This reflects the irony -- there's nothing going on in a place that has so much meaning for our history and for the people who died there.
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