Dream Vacations Are His Gift to Dying Children : Philanthropy: A Holocaust veteran’s clearinghouse and resort village help families grant the last wishes of terminally ill youngsters.

As a boy of 13 in a Nazi concentration camp, Henri Landwirth learned what it’s like to wait fearfully for death.

Now, at 63, he believes he has been living on borrowed time for 45 years. He feels a need to “give something back.” So he’s helping make dreams come true for terminally ill children.

The slim, white-haired Landwirth, once interned at Auschwitz, founded Give Kids the World, a special retreat for children whose last wishes are for visits to Walt Disney World, Sea World or one of the many other tourist attractions in central Florida.

Because of his efforts--and the generosity of some major corporations and individuals--hundreds of boys and girls come here every year with their families. All it takes is for a sick child to contact a local group in his or her hometown.

The families spend a week at the vacation village, each in one of the 32 villas.

Landwirth said that 75% of the dying children want to see Mickey Mouse. He cited statistics compiled from visitors showing that 80% of the families never before left their home states, and just as many will never travel again as a family. The trip, for them, is a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

“Families can do all the major theme parks or whatever they want. Each kid gets a gift every day. We have a big party; local restaurants provide food. The Disney and Sea World characters visit and entertain. We have volunteers working with the kids.”

The village, in the countryside less than a mile from U.S. 192 near Disney World, has a playground, a pool equipped for handicapped swimmers, a fishing lake, a mock pirate ship and a large cafeteria and family center.

“We never turn anyone away, and we can accommodate a family on very short notice, because the greatest enemy of these kids is time,” the soft-spoken Landwirth said.

He came to his role as benefactor through the determination to survive that he developed as a Jewish youth in captivity.

He and his twin sister, Margot, were separated from their parents and sent to separate concentration camps in German-occupied Poland in the early days of World War II. Their father, Max, was killed soon after his imprisonment. Their mother, Fanny, was one of more than 1,000 women herded aboard a ship that was blown up at sea just weeks before the Nazis surrendered.

After five years of imprisonment, young Henri managed to escape and spent about a month in hiding and wandering--homeless, sick, hungry and scared. Finally, three days after the war ended, a family in a small Czech village took him in.

Landwirth recovered and hitchhiked back to a small town in Poland where he had learned that his sister was living. Together they returned to Belgium, where they were born, and he came to New York City in 1949.

He worked briefly as a diamond cutter, then was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. After his discharge, he went to hotel-management school under the GI Bill, got married and eventually got work as a bellhop in a Miami Beach hotel.

Hard work paid off in better jobs, and soon he was manager of the Starlite Hotel in Cocoa Beach at the time the nation’s space program was gearing up in nearby Cape Canaveral.

He became innkeeper to the original crew of astronauts, the Mercury 7. Virtually the entire space hierarchy and press corps moved into first one and then another hotel he operated during those early years.

He became friends with astronauts John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Scott Carpenter and media personalities such as Walter Cronkite--all of whom would later serve on the advisory board of Give Kids the World Foundation.

“We were like a family,” Landwirth said, recalling the exciting days of the space program’s infancy.

Glenn, now a U.S. senator from Ohio, went into partnership with Landwirth in the hotel business in the Orlando area in 1970, soon after Disney World opened. For years, they were franchise holders in three large Holiday Inns.

They still own one in Kissimmee, and are planning to build a new hotel at the Disney community of Lake Buena Vista.

Landwirth and the astronauts also became founding members of the Mercury Seven Foundation, which sponsors scholarships for upper-level college students in the aerospace, science and engineering fields.

Landwirth, who has a long background of philanthropy, first became interested in helping terminally ill children when, as a hotel operator, he opened free rooms to some of the families who were sent here occasionally by volunteer groups around the country.

“I remember two kids died while waiting for arrangements to be made for a visit to Disney World,” Landwirth said. “It took so long to coordinate efforts for airline transportation, lodging, free tickets at the attractions, food and all of the other things.

“I decided something had to be done.”

Landwirth used a foundation he had set up in his mother’s name to finance his idea of acting as a clearinghouse for the last-wish trips.

He first contacted Disney officials three years ago, and they enthusiastically agreed to help.

“They were fantastic!” he said. “To this day, they’ve never said no to anything, and they are our biggest supporters and contributors--from money to services and people and all the special things that they do and do not publicize.”

After that, Sea World, Cypress Gardens and other theme parks joined the effort on a permanent basis, along with Holiday Inns and some 40 other businesses and groups large and small. Hotels continued to accommodate the families until the village was opened last year.

The $3.5 million it cost to build the village came from donations, with $1.7 million coming from Holiday Inns Corp. and its employees and $1.8 million in labor and materials from local businesses and the individuals, said Julia H. Wylam, director of development.

Landwirth estimated the value of the goods, services, tickets, gifts and other items provided directly to the kids and their families last year at $3 million.

There are some 150 wish-granting foundations around the world that identify the children, provide administrative and medical assistance and round-trip transportation for their visits here.

Many of the kids write to Landwirth and the village staff after their return home.

“You are a wonderful man,” wrote teen-ager Amy Johnson from Phoenix, shortly before she died of leukemia.

“Children are supposed to be our future, but kids like me don’t have futures, we just have memories--memories of our past. You’re in my prayers for remembering us little people.”

Lisa and Jack McDonald of Lewiston, Maine, who brought their 5-year-old daughter, Kristin, to the village in March, wrote:

“Our visit to the Kids Village allowed us as parents to share our experiences, hopes and fears with other parents who are undergoing very similar actions and emotions in their respective lives.”

Landwirth now devotes most of his time to the village.

“This is my life now. I’m fulfilling a spiritual need,” he said.

“I love this country. I love what’s happened to me here. This is more rewarding than anything I have ever done.”