For All the World To See

Give Kids the World Village is a nonprofit resort in Kissimmee established in 1986 to provide joyful, cost-free, weeklong vacations to children with critical illnesses and their families. Spanning 89 acres and serving more than 200,000 families from all 50 states and 78 countries over 40 years, it is easy to measure the impact of Give Kids the World in numbers alone. But numbers do not convey the true magic of this place. That can only happen by sharing the story of Give Kids the World or the Village’s founder, Henri Landwirth (z”l).

It’s a story that was almost lost to history, but thanks to the combined efforts of Give Kids the World or the Village staff and a children’s book author-turned-documentarian, Henri’s story is being preserved and celebrated on the occasion of his organization’s 40th anniversary.

Philanthropy Born from Tragedy

In 1927, Henri and his twin sister Margot were born in Antwerp, Belgium, to parents Max and Fanny. When he was 13, Henri and his family were forced by Nazis into the Krakow ghetto in Poland. Max was shot and killed and Fanny, Margot, and Henri were separated and sent to different concentration camps. Henri spent five years at five death and labor camps, including Auschwitz and Mauthausen, but managed to survive when a Nazi soldier who was ordered to shoot Henri and other prisoners instead let them escape into the woods. By the end of the war, Henri learned that his mother had been killed, but he was miraculously reunited with twin sister Margot in a German village through word of mouth from other survivors. That is the darkest – but not the final – chapter of Henri’s story.

After the war, Henri immigrated to New York City, speaking no English and with only 20 dollars in his pocket. He was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served for two years during the Korean War, learning English along the way. Henri used his G.I. Bill benefits to take a hotel-management course while working a night shift at the front desk of Manhattan’s Wellington Hotel.

He completed his studies, worked his way up from bellman to an operations leader at various New York hotels, and moved to Florida in 1954 to manage the 100-room Starlight Motel in Cocoa Beach. With its proximity to Cape Canaveral during the start of American space exploration, the Starlight Motel housed the original Mercury 7 astronauts, whom Henri befriended. Decades later in 1984, those friendships would lead Henri and the six surviving astronauts to found the Mercury 7 Foundation, now called the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, providing merit-based scholarships to undergraduate students. That chapter of Henri’s story reached all the way into space – but would not be the highest he soared.

Strategy and Opportunity

In 1969, Henri strategically opened his first Holiday Inn franchise in Orlando, foreseeing the tourism boom that would follow Walt Disney World’s establishment in 1971. By the 1980s, Henri had expanded his hotel ownership across Central Florida and began providing free rooms for the Make-A-Wish Foundation to offer terminally ill children and their families no-cost accommodations during their wish trips to Disney World.

In 1986, when Henri discovered that his free reservation for a wish child named Amy had been canceled because she passed away before all of her travel arrangements could be finalized, he made it his mission to ensure no other child would run out of time like that again. He founded Give Kids the World Village that same year. Through funding from Henri, corporate and individual donors, and partnerships with other foundations, the resort officially opened in 1989, and by the early 1990s, it was hosting thousands of families each year.

Remembering Henri

The rest of the Give Kids the World story is history, and that’s almost how it became. During the last several years, Give Kids the World Village seemed to be losing the knowledge of Henri’s story. Every year on Henri’s birthday, March 7, the Village celebrated Founder’s Day as a way to honor his legacy. But between his passing in 2018 and the temporary shutdown of the resort during the pandemic, there were fewer and fewer employees and visitors who knew Henri personally and understood how his childhood motivated his philanthropy.

“Covid was a very big disruption. We had to close and lay off staff, so we lost a lot of that institutional knowledge. We lost the thread back to Henri,” says Caroline Schumacher, the current president and CEO of Give Kids the World or the Village, who rejoined the organization in June of 2025 after serving as president and CEO of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and leading that organization through its own 40th anniversary. Prior to that, Caroline had worked at Give Kids the World or the Village in almost every capacity, starting as a volunteer there through the Disney College Program.

Gary Landwirth, the oldest of Henri’s three children and a member of Give Kids the World or the Village’s current Board of Directors, could see the difference between families who got to meet his father when he would visit the Village and those who did not know Henri or his story.

“We, the Board, realized we needed to have a way that would bring him back, show his values, the difficulty of his early years, the brilliance of his middle years in the space program, and his success in the hotel story of Orlando. But it’s all one arc. You can’t tell the story of Give Kids the World without sharing that story,” says Gary.

A Life in Pictures

It turns out there was someone who knew exactly how to tell Henri’s story. Audrey Perrott is a children’s author who became friends with Gary in 2003 while serving as the communications manager at A Gift for Teaching, the nonprofit Gary started in 1998 to provide Central Florida schools with free supplies and arts programs. Audrey had met Henri a couple of times, remembering that “he exuded warmth and kindness and gentleness.” After Gary invited Audrey to watch an old documentary about Henri’s life, she knew his story had to be shared more widely and asked Gary for permission to do so.

“She wrote the most amazing, beautiful, perfectly toned picture book about my dad’s story,” says Gary, “in a way that’s gentle enough that kids could kind of be exposed to the harsh realities without being hit over the head with it, and that is a really tough balance to strike.”

Gary and his family loved the book. Audrey’s agent loved the book. Publishers even loved the book. But a Holocaust story for young children turned out to be a tough sell.

“Picture books are deceptively simple, and they are some of the most powerful tools we have as humans to get stories across to children when they are little sponges,” says Audrey. “We decided to shelve the book for the time being. I told Gary, ‘Look, I wrote this for you and your family and your dad. This is yours. I just wanted to try this first.’”

From the Page to the Screen

Last spring, when Audrey was staying at Gary’s house while on a separate book tour, they had the idea to turn the biography she wrote about Henri into a short film. After adapting the book into a screenplay, Audrey had just the right filmmaker in mind to bring the project to fruition. While working at an advertising agency, she met a video production intern named Fernando Tosetti, who made a senior project about Give Kids the World while he was a student at the University of Central Florida.

“It’s been this beautiful, full-circle, paying-it-forward process,” says Audrey. “Gary mentored me, and I had the opportunity to meet and mentor Fernando.”

The short film is just under eight minutes and blends live action, animation, narration, and interview clips of Henri with an original score from Orlando composer Joe Hodgins. The videography team was also local. Audrey flew in from her home in North Carolina to work with Fernando during filming, and 11 Give Kids the World or the Village alumni families were the on-screen talent in the film. Despite the tight production schedule – which was necessary to have the film ready in time for its Founder’s Day premiere on March 7, 2026 – everything came together.

“It felt very much like the way Gary has described Henri’s influence on bringing people together to make the village,” says Audrey. “You can’t hear his story without wanting to be a part of it.”

Time To Celebrate... and Remember

Attendees at the recent Give Kids the World 40th anniversary event included donors, wish families, volunteers, and staff, both past and present. Everyone received a printed art piece featuring poetry from Audrey’s screenplay and enjoyed food at what Caroline described as “a big family reunion.” In addition to multiple showings of the film, the producers, Audrey, and Gary participated in a panel discussion. The film itself will live on in the Village’s Star Tower, next to the iconic Castle of Miracles, where a gold star is placed for every child who visits Give Kids the World Village. This year, a star was placed in honor of Henri to ensure that his legacy, too, would always live on.

Just as everything at the Village was created with accessibility in mind – from the rides to the theatre to the ice-cream parlor that features lower countertops so children in wheelchairs can see the available flavors – that same attention was brought to the filmmaking.

“In creating the film and bringing it to life, it was so important for us to not shy away from the hard parts and gloss over it but also do it in a sensitive, delicate, accessible way, knowing that it will live at the village and families will be watching this with young children,” says Audrey. “Not just families with young children, but children who are going through their own unimaginable, devastating time. As a cancer survivor and a mom of children with medical needs, that also informed how I made the film into a piece that would help families understand the devastation of what Henri went through while still sharing light and hope and showing what came out of the ashes of it. Knowing that part of his life explains why he started Give Kids the World.”

Henri’s light lives on through Give Kids the World Village, and now his story does, too.