![]() ![]() ![]() He worked on guns designed to shoot down Allied planes, and dug underground in unnamed places. In that time, Henri was shuttled between Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Płaszów, Gusen, and Ostrowitz. “What words can convey the total lack of dignity that takes over a person’s soul when such unimaginable events suddenly become the only reality?” He was 13. “To be treated in a manner which is beneath that of an animal is at once both confusing and frightening,” he wrote. Henri arrived at Auschwitz, where he became no one to camp guards but prisoner B4343, identified by the tattoo on his left forearm. In time, Henri, Fanny, and Margot were herded into the Krakow ghetto and later packed into train cars. Fanny traveled to see him every day, but never made it past the first guard. In 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland and initiated World War II, Max was taken without reason to a prison called Radom and incarcerated, held without trial. In 1930, the Landwirths moved to Poland, compelled by Max’s belief that more opportunity awaited there-in his home country-than in Belgium. Henri Landwirth was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on March 1, 1927, along with his twin sister, Margot, to Jewish clothing salesman Max Landwirth and his wife, Fanny. “I see life differently from someone who has not seen life’s dark side,” Henri Landwirth, founder of Give Kids the World, wrote in his 1996 memoir, Gift of Life. At the 89-acre storybook resort that was designed just for them, once upon a time. But many of these children and their families stay 22 miles south on the Florida Turnpike, at Give Kids the World Village, where, once they arrive, they realize they’d rather not fill their days at Disney or SeaWorld after all. Of the roughly 27,000 children in the United States diagnosed with a critical illness every year, a majority are eligible to have wishes granted through organizations such as the Dream Factory or Make-A-Wish, which considers eligible any child age 3–18 with a “progressive, degenerative or malignant condition that has placed the child’s life in jeopardy.” Roughly half of these 27,000 children wish to come to the Orlando area, where Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando, and SeaWorld dance just down the street from each other. But here, at Give Kids the World Village, these illnesses seem to matter a little less, if only for a week. To be lucky enough to visit this place, you will be unlucky enough to be a child with a critical illness, or someone in their constellation. Admittance is sacred, special, and limited to the very few who are lucky enough to receive an all-expenses-paid trip to central Florida to be fêted as guests of honor, though some might say it is a very lack of luck or felicity that brought them here in the first place: a damning of atoms, a genetic wild card. The world’s most magical place is not somewhere you would ever hope to go. ![]()
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