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On March 19, Lerch spoke at the Hyde Park Free Library Annex building to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz, on Jan. 27, 1945.
"If you don't know your past, you can't make progress in the future," Lerch said, explaining the value of studying history.
Lerch, who was born April 31, 1931 in Lodz, Poland, lived in Lodz ghetto from February 1940 until August 1944, when he was moved to Auschwitz.
He said he knows he came to Auschwitz on Aug. 21 of that year, at the age of 13, because later he read that his number, B733, was assigned on that date.
Lerch's lecture, entitled "Resistance, Courage and Resilience," focused on the lives of three women who also survived internment at Auschwitz.
"This is the history of three human beings who lived in a time beyond human comprehension," Lerch said.
The three women were Charlotte Delbo, a performing artist; Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, a social activist; and Dr. Adelaide Hautval, a psychiatrist.
Lerch told of his own life to put into context the life these women endured at Auschwitz.
""Dante's Inferno" is a comedy compared to this place. It was the bottom of the world," Lerch said.
Three heroic women
Adelaine Hautval, a French physician born in 1906, illegally had crossed a demarcation line into a German-occupied part of France and was jailed. There, she befriended Jews who were imprisoned with her. She was forced to wear a patch that read "Friend of a Jew" and was sent to Auschwitz in 1942.
There, Germans tried to put Hautval to work in a hospital where experimentation was being performed on patients without anesthesia.
Lerch explained that Auschwitz hospitals were not really hospitals at all; they offered no medication. He told of a time when he contracted typhoid and managed to survive hospitalization despite any medical help.
Hautval refused to participate in testing hospital patients. She was transferred from Auschwitz in 1944. Her testimony in the Nuremberg Trials helped to convict Nazi doctors who maintained they were just following orders.
Charlotte Delbo, who recounted her experiences at Auschwitz in her book, "To Auschwitz and Back," was a performing artist from France. She was working in Latin America when Germany invaded France.
She quit her job and moved back to Paris in an attempt to join her husband. On arriving, she learned her husband was gone, participating in the Resistance.
She met a man who took her to meet her husband. When they met up, they were both arrested and imprisoned. Her husband was executed and she was sent to Auschwitz in 1943, where she worked manufacturing explosive powder. Delbo was eventually transferred to Sweden and from there moved back to Paris.
Lerch said in Paris after the war there was much suicide. But Delbo, devastated by her misfortune, dealt with her pain by writing. She put her writing aside, but was encouraged later to publish her work.Her first book was printed in 1965.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk was a Jewish social activist born in Poland in 1915. After surviving Auschwitz, Nomberg-Przytyk wrote of her experiences as well. When she submitted her manuscript for publication in 1967, during the Israeli war with the Arabs, she was told to take out all aspects dealing with Jews. She refused.
In 1985, her work, "Auschwitz: The True Tales of a Grotesque Land" was published in the United States.
Lerch also noted that March 11 was the anniversary of the death of Anne Frank, who died two months before her 16th birthday. Frank's diary was published posthumously and is one of the most widely read, moving accounts of the Holocaust.
Learning from the past
Lerch said he did not understand, as a 13-year-old, what was happening around him while he was at Auschwitz.
"I didn't know there was extermination in Auschwitz," Lerch said. "There was a smell, but I couldn't locate it," he recalled.
Lerch said many years later, after he had come to the United States, he was camping with his wife and friends, and they were barbecuing liver. He said it was the same smell as burning flesh, and he recognized the smell that was ubiquitous at Auschwitz and became ill.
On one occasion, while swimming in New York City, it occurred to Lerch that he should reflect more seriously on his life. After someone (presumably seeing the number tattooed on his arm) asked him how he managed to survive a concentration camp, Lerch said he began thinking about his survival.
Living in Brooklyn at the time, Lerch began frequenting a local library, and was encouraged by the librarian to read about history. Lerch said this prompted him to read Holocaust literature, and to discover the stories of these three particular women.
Lerch moved to Staatsburg in December.
Library Director Greg Callahan expressed his appreciation that Lerch was able to deliver his lecture to residents to commemorate this significant historical time.
"Since we just observed the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the program is a timely one. Also, this month is Women's History Month," Callahan said.
