Give Kids The World celebrates 40 years of giving, honors founder

The Kissimmee-based Give Kids The World Village celebrated 40 years of providing vacations to children with critical illnesses and their families.
At its annual Founder’s Day event last week, GKTW also honored the life and legacy of its founder Henri Landwirth with a viewing of a new short film biography as well adding his very own star in his honor in its Castle of Miracles. This year’s Founder’s Day would have marked Landwirth’s 99th birthday.
When a child arrives at the village, each one is given a small star to personalize. That is then placed in with the others in the Castle of Miracles as a permanent reminder of their visit before they leave the Village. The Castle now has over 200,000 stars adorning its ceilings and walls.
“Why does Henri get a star now? We can all say he probably should have had a star from the very beginning, but we’ve never done it,” said Caroline Schumacher, who took over as CEO of the Village this year from Henri’s widow Pamela Landwirth. “It really all goes back to his vision to create this place for children where they can just be kids. Families can make memories, they feel safe, they don’t have to worry about anything and really protecting the integrity of the children that we serve. When you look at the shield (on which Henri’s star appears), Henri was a protector of these kids and their memories.”
Today the 89-acre resort has 166 villas for guest families. It employs almost 200 people and is supported by the work of over 15,000 volunteers who fill 1,800 shifts a week.
A new short film briefly outlining Henri Landwirth’s biography and vision premiered at the celebration. The film touches on Landwirth’s childhood, when he spent five years in a World War II concentration camp, losing his family, before being rescued at the end of the war and coming to America. In the 1980’s, after opening an area franchised Holiday Inn, he began offering complimentary hotel rooms to children with life threatening illnesses who wished to visit Disney World. Recognizing the need for a place for such children and their families, Landwirth purchased property in Kissimmee to establish the Village, which opened in 1986. The film will be shown regularly to Village families and visitors.
“You all know my Dad was in a concentration camp and had a terrible childhood,” said Gary Landwirth, Henri’s son, speaking about the film. “He rose above all that and became successful. And then he was able to see that it wasn’t money that made him happy, it was serving other people. And the reason I think it’s so important that we remember that part of his life is that the Village couldn’t be here without understanding how he viewed the world. You saw the film how he saw himself in other people’s eyes, and it was because he understood what it was like to not know whether he was going to be around tomorrow, or the next day.”
“The stars were absolutely a major factor in how I rewrote that manuscript into a screenplay,” said Audrey Perrott, a children’s book author and the writer of the short film’s screenplay “ It really started with a conversation between Gary and I talking about bringing Henri’s spirit into this space and wanting him to have a star here. The star served as a beautiful metaphor that we could show the darkest parts of Henri’s story in the film, but do so in a way that was symbolic of him, his family, the families here that went through the village, and also the families that were lost in the Holocaust, and be able to do that in a very gentle and special way, because in order to understand this whole brightness of Give Kids The World Village you have to know dark, dark world.”
“When he spoke to families, when he interacted with the kids,” said Gary Landwirth, “there was a special magnetic bond that he had between the families that were here and him because they understood the difficulties he had had in his life and how he could understand their difficulties. I think that’s why understanding that part of his life is so, so important.”
“The reality is there’s a very dark journey for these families before they get here,” said Schumacher, “And it’s a ray of light the week that they’re here, but there’s the reality that there can be a very dark journey when they get home. Not for everybody, but for many, and that darkness can come anytime. We want the Village to always be a place of light and that star represents that.”