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by Jeremy Schoolfield
War veterans, in general, don’t like to talk about their experiences in combat. Henri Landwirth is like that. Though he didn’t wear a military uniform during World War II, he fought his own battles and earned his own stripes. The Holocaust survivor has the emotional scars to prove it.
From age 13 to 18, the Belgium native was shuttled from one Nazi concentration camp to another, never knowing where his next morsel of food would come from or when the threat of death hovering all around him would finally close in. He escaped toward the end of the war and eventually made his way to America with just $20 in his pocket.
Landwirth rose up through the ranks of the Central Florida hotel industry to become a leading figure in the region. On March 7, 1986, his 59th birthday, he founded Give Kids The World, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children with life-threatening illnesses. Using his considerable clout as a hotelier, Landwirth began bringing these Wish children to Central Florida’s theme parks, giving them the best experiences of their too-short lifetimes.
Even a man who believes in miracles never thought his little project would become so successful a quarter century later, hosting more than 106,000 families from 72 countries. Give Kids The World Village in Kissimmee, Florida, founded in 1989, is now a 70-acre resort with 140 villas that host families’ weeklong vacations for the mind, body, and soul.
 “I think my past, from age 13 to 18, stayed with me to this day,” Landwirth says. “I will never forget the days when I was hungry, when I was in [concentration] camps, when I never knew if I was going to live. As a matter of fact, I knew I wasn’t going to live. I knew it. But I’m here.
“So this is my way of saying, ‘Thank you, God, for doing what you did for me and to me.’ That is an extension of what I went through. I don’t talk about it much, but if I hadn’t gone through those camps, I might never have recognized the need of these sick kids.
“God is here in this Village, around the clock. Every time something good happens, we just look up and say, ‘Thank you, God.’ It’s a good feeling.”
“It’s one of the most magical places you’ll ever be,” adds Give Kids The World President Pam Landwirth, once married to Henri and still his dear friend. “Things happen here you just can’t explain. We have guardian angels.”
As Give Kids The World approaches its 25th birthday, Henri and Pam sat with FUNWORLD for a rare and exclusive interview to reflect on the foundation’s history, mission, impact, and the remarkable people who make it all happen.
Man of Vision
Give Kids The World (GKTW) began in a 100-square-foot office in Henri’s Holiday Inn Main Gate East in Kissimmee (somewhere in the foundation’s archives is the original spiral notebook he used for reservations). As demand increased Henri realized he couldn’t rely on the generosity of fellow hoteliers for space to house Wish families; instead, he needed a place for these special visitors to call their own. So, much like Walt Disney buying up previously unused land in Central Florida to create Walt Disney World, Henri picked 35 acres of wetlands and orange groves in Kissimmee. He built eight villas originally, but as Disney said of his original Disneyland, the Village never stops growing and changing. This year marks the debut of two new projects: the Star Tower expansion of the Castle of Miracles and the new Gallery of Hope visitor center.
“A lot of people have good ideas but they don’t have vision. Henri’s a visionary,” says Bill Coan, whose Orlando based Itec Entertainment Corporation helped guide much of the Village’s expansion for the past 15-plus years. “His vision wasn’t just a place; it was the experience. He was thinking, ‘How do we provide the best experience for as many children and families as possible?’ Henri is like Walt in that his focus was on the experience, not just the brick and mortar.
“The passion that the Village has is to separate these families from the difficulties of their day-to-day lives,” Coan continues. “The best way to do that is to create a place that doesn’t resemble anything close to a hospital or medical facility. Henri’s idea was to create a fantasy experience for them that doesn’t end with the theme parks. The Village is a place that continues to fulfill that wish. This is home for the week they’re here.”
Henri brought in some of the best minds in the theme park industry to construct his whimsical Village: a Castle of Miracles with an overgrown mushroom for a tower; a train station that looks like a giant toy box; a playground that doubles as a life-size “Candy Land” game. But Pam says its core “is all Henri.”
“He had this vision of creating a colorful fantasy world where everything is for children,” she says.
“Color, visual stimulation, music … everything’s about happiness.”
“When I come here, I ask them to turn the music up,” Henri adds.
 A Family Support System
The Village’s goal is to give these children and their families one week of peace, of hope, of joy. A week where they can get away from doctors and bills and stress to just enjoy one another and remember what it’s like to be a family again.
“It was like a breath of fresh air,” says Terasa Pietruszka, who brought her cancer-ridden daughter, Alyssa, to the Village in 2001 (click her for their own miraculous story). “When your child is sick, you lose focus on being that happy family and caring for each other. It turns into trying to keep somebody alive. Being here taught us we can still be a family. We were able to change our outlook on life.”
“This might be the first and the last vacation that this family’s had,” Henri says. “It’s a big thing. This is their Village; it’s not our Village.”
Originally Henri worried the children would be afraid to be around so many others who are sick just like them. The exact opposite is true at the Village, as he discovered very quickly. “Nobody stares at them here. They feel like they belong for the first time,” Pam says. Coan has seen families naturally gravitate toward one another, sharing successes and stresses on the poolside deck or in the Gingerbread House restaurant.
“We have families coming here that, in their day-to-day life, are segregated from the rest of the world,” Coan says. “When they come here, everybody else has the same challenges. They connect instantly with each other. That’s the magic of the Village: the burden of being different from the rest of the world is gone.”
The Business of Charity
Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) is an independent evaluator of charities’ efficiency. In its most recent review GKTW received Navigator’s highest rating, due in large part to the fact that families directly receive 93 percent of the money, goods, and services donated, leaving only 7 percent for administrative costs.
 This intense focus on maximizing every dollar is one of Henri’s core tenets for Give Kids The World, and something he continues to take pride in after 25 years. He wants there to be no possible question about where the money’s going or how it’s being used.
“Nonprofit is a tax status, not a management style. To be successful, it has to be run like a business. You can take care of business while you’re taking care of hearts,” says Pam, whose job it is to go recruit the Village’s $12 million in annual cash donations. “We want folks to know we’re good stewards of that money. It’s who we are—we want to be transparent. And it’s something that sets us apart.”
Volunteers are critical to GKTW’s sparkling efficiency. An astounding 1,200 “Angels” work on property each week accomplishing about 85 percent of the Village’s workload; Pam estimates these volunteers save the foundation upwards of $2 million in annual labor costs. And their demographics are just as impressive: The Village draws everyone from retired local residents to college students to families with healthy children. For the first week of January, one group of students drove 22 straight hours from Michigan to spend part of their winter break volunteering at the Village.
“People want to give back and make a difference in this world,” Pam says. “Some can give money; others donate their time and share their talents. This is a perfect blending of all those.”
No matter where they come from, though, the goal for all is the same: delivering a memorable experience for the guests.
“In the theme park industry, you try to make everything perfect so the guests will keep coming back. We try to make it perfect because our guests can’t come back,” Pam says. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and we don’t get a second chance to make it happen.”
Steadfast Future
The Star Tower and Gallery of Hope will be the last major expansions at GKTW for a while. The foundation— like all of us—waits and hopes the economy improves and purse strings loosen. There is land for another 56 villas, bringing the total to 196; the master plan also calls for a complete overhaul of the administration building and expansion of the Gingerbread House, “but we’re not going to rush into that,” says Pam, who’s seen the Village quadruple in size since joining the organization in 1992.
As he approaches his 84th birthday, Henri is not as involved in the day-to-day operations of the foundation and Village as he used to be, but the big concepts still have to meet with his approval before they’re greenlit. “His heart is here and his inspiration is here,” Pam says. “His legacy is here, and he’s still the heart and soul of the Village.”
“There’s no other place like this,” Henri says. “We’ve had over 106,000 families who came to this Village, and we must have changed many of their lives—especially the children. That by itself is wonderful. I couldn’t think of anything better for our lives.”
Contact Senior Editor Jeremy Schoolfield at jschoolfield@IAAPA.org.
The Girl Who Lived
 Cancer survivor Princess Alyssa is the Village’s own ‘miracle child’
When they meet it’s as if they haven’t seen each other in years, even though it’s only been a few months. The ferocity of their embrace brings a roomful of people to immediate and complete silence. They don’t talk for several seconds, though tears spill from their eyes and trickle down their faces around the creases of their smiles.
Pam Landwirth sheds tears of sympathy all too often in her role as president of Give Kids The World. But not today. Today she’s crying from pure, overwhelming joy. Because locked in her arms is her Princess Alyssa, the miracle child who knows in her heart the Village cured her of cancer.
A Hopeless Case Discovers Hope
Alyssa Pietruszka, who hails from Wisconsin, was diagnosed with Stage 3 kidney cancer at 3 years old. A tumor the size of a grapefruit cost her one kidney, but the cancer had already spread into her stomach and a lung before it was discovered. Six months of chemotherapy showed no progress, other than to drive all the hair off Alyssa’s perfect head and drop her weight to about 20 pounds. The doctors said they’d done everything they could, but there was no hope for recovery.
Alyssa’s one desire was to be a princess at Walt Disney World. “I didn’t want the Wish, because that meant she was dying,” says her mother, Terasa, words
that still bring her to tears even now, nine years later. “I didn’t want to believe that was the end.”
But with a suitcase full of princess dresses, Alyssa and her family arrived at Give Kids The World in December 2001. She has remarkably clear memories of that life-altering week, even though she was only 3.5 years old. Alyssa describes the Village as a feeling of “warmth” and remembers seeing the Ice Cream Palace first and wanting some dessert right now.
“The first thing we heard when we got out was the music playing,” her mother recalls. “It was very calming, and you could hear people talking and laughing. We started right then to forget about … everything.”
Alyssa slept most of her first day at the Village, but Terasa says her daughter “woke up a completely different kid.” She hadn’t walked for more than a month prior to her visit, but “when I came to Give Kids The World, I started running, I started laughing,” Alyssa says. “I felt happy— there were no doctors around, no medicine or anything to take. Give Kids The World made me better. It’s my personal magic place.”
Landwirth likes to gaze out her office window as the Wish children and their families walk down the Village’s main avenue. She says Alyssa was impossible to miss: The child’s bald head was adorned with a tiara, and every day she wore a different princess outfit. “She was the most beautiful little girl I think I’d ever laid eyes on,” Landwirth recalls. “She had the most expressive eyes, and they emitted love. She just touched my heart from afar.”
A Life of Purpose
Alyssa says she knew all along GKTW had healed her. “What I took with me was the joy and hope of being here,” and a sense of accomplishment for making the trip and acting like a kid again, she says. “That made me better. It made me overcome everything.”
 She was feeling so well upon returning to Wisconsin she didn’t even want to go back on chemo, believing she was already cured. Well, she didn’t have to stay on the drugs long, anyway; within two months, her incurable cancer began to shrink away. The treatments stopped after six months, she was declared in remission at 6 years old, and at age 7 her doctors certified her “cancer free.”
“They were baffled by how quick it went away,” Terasa says of Alyssa’s doctors, who to this day still refer to her as their “miracle child.” In the years since her full recovery, Alyssa has become an unofficial spokesperson for Give Kids The World. She’s traveled the country to share her experience, she spoke at the foundation’s annual gala, and returned more than once to volunteer. At 12 years old, she knows exactly what she wants to do with her life: become Landwirth’s successor as president of GKTW.
“God put us here for a reason,” Alyssa says. “God said, ‘I’m going to have you do this, and either you’re going to come up and live with me, or you’re going to be a better person in the end. And that better person will touch other people’s hearts, help people in need, and do wonderful things.’ This is where I belong.”
“Hope is almost an overused word, but it’s still the best word to describe what we do. It was always hard to put a face on that … until I met Alyssa,” says Landwirth, who has a large framed photo of the 3-year-old tiara-adorned child on her office wall. “At the time she was here, it was pretty much hopeless for her. She came down fully expecting not to survive much longer. Something sparked here, and here we are nine years later.
“She’s given me hope, and the strength to go on many times when things have gotten very challenging. She’s that spark for me that says, ‘You can do it.’ She’s touched the lives of people she’ll never meet.”
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