by Anthony DeMatteo
Staff Writer
It was an unexpected beginning to one of Jacksonville’s most active charities.
Six weeks after retiring from decades of owning Orlando hotels, Henri Landwirth met with a group of men at Jacksonville’s I.M. Sulzbacher Center for the Homeless.
“They said that had never happened,” said Landwirth. “Nobody asks to speak to homeless people.”
Telling the men he wanted to help them, Landwirth was answered with silence. He told them he had once been homeless – following the five years he spent living in the concentration camps of Adolph Hitler’s Germany.
Then, one man stood and pulled his pants down.
“He said, ‘I never have any underwear,’” said the 79-year-old Landwirth. “The other guy says, ‘For years, I’ve never had any socks.’ And that’s how we started – socks and underwear.”
Landwirth quickly started buying packages of underwear from department stores and giving them to people in need.
Soon, Dignity-U-Wear was born. Now in its seventh year, the nonprofit organization donates new clothing to people in 31 states – 836,000 pieces of clothing in 2005, worth about $16 million.
Dignity collects clothes from manufacturers and retailers, sorts and warehouses them, then distributes them to charitable organizations for donation.
Landwirth bought the Myrtle Street building Dignity occupies from Jeff Spence, despite the city doubling the offer to Spence while Landwirth was out of town, said Landwirth.
“He was honorable enough that when I got to town, he said, ‘Henry, you can sell this for double the price,’” Landwirth said of Spence. “I had no contract. I had nothing except a handshake.”
Landwirth told Spence he would not sell to the city at any price.
That week, Landwirth said his belief in miracles was reinforced after he was offered $200,000 – the sale price of the building – to give a speech on philanthropy to about 8,000 women in Japan.
A miraculous life
Landwirth is an expert on miracles. Ripped with his family from their home in Poland in 1939, he was imprisoned in German concentration camps from ages 13-18. His father was shot in the head and buried in a mass grave. With about a thousand other women, his mother was herded aboard a ship that was detonated on the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean after its crew escaped by air. His skull was fractured by the butt of a soldier’s rifle. Fever nearly killed him. He was separated from his twin sister, Margot. The daily smell of smoke from men, women and children burning in crematoriums filled his throat.
“I did not believe in God. I said, ‘Where is God?’” Landwirth said, looking above him with welling eyes. “’They are killing us here, by the millions, and where is God?’”
Before her death, Landwirth walked passed his mother in one of the camps. She asked if he had an extra piece of bread. He had nothing.
Later, in 1943, he risked death by walking to a fence in Auschwitz near its women prisoners, wanting to replace the memory of her simple, unfulfilled request. There, he saw her for the last time, broken from hunger and abuse.
Near the end of the war, Landwirth and a few other prisoners were being marched toward seemingly certain death by two soldiers when he heard them talking in German.
“They said to each other in German, ‘Why don’t we just let them go? The war is almost over,’” and I heard that,” said Landwirth. “Maybe that was something that helped me to forgive.”
Landwirth was a boy who had become a man amid almost unfathomable evil. He had found God again. And he was free.
“I had no place to turn,” he said. “I had no money. I needed a job and I couldn’t afford to buy anything.”
With a fractured skull and gangrenous leg wounds revealing bone, he walked for what he thinks was hundreds of miles. He found a barn and a sack of straw, where he thought he would sleep before dying. A woman woke him sometime later, telling him the war was over and that he was in Czechoslovakia. She and her husband kept him for weeks in their home, bringing in doctors just in time to save his legs.
When he came to America, he spoke almost no English. Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, he was assigned to cut crystals because his superiors heard he’d been trained as a diamond cutter in his native Belgium.
“They thought it was the same thing,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were talking about. When the sergeant found out I had no idea about crystals, I was his worst enemy.”
During his tour, Landwirth was ordered to drive a truck to get supplies. He told the sergeant he didn’t know how to drive. Forced behind the wheel, he backed the truck through a building and got assigned to seven weeks of “KP,” or kitchen patrol, duty.
When Landwirth speaks to students today, he shows them “Gift of Life in America,” a film in which he is interviewed by his grandchildren. In it, he and his sister hold hands as they disagree about forgiving the Germans who took so much from them.
“I was angry, but I’m not angry anymore,” he said. “If I would continue to be angry, I couldn’t be sitting here. I’d be in a sanitarium, probably.”
Learning the business
Landwirth went to college on the G.I. Bill in 1954, getting a degree in hotel technology while working at the Wellington Hotel in Manhattan. He made $38 a week as a relief clerk.
“I learned every single job at that hotel, that was my security,” he said. “I actually paid a guy – I had to bring him a bottle of bourbon so I could do his job every night. But I learned how to be a night auditor, and he slept and drank in the back.”
Landwirth was managing a Cocoa Beach hotel when the Mercury crew was preparing to man the first American space flight. There, he formed a friendship with longtime CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, who wrote the foreword to Landwirth’s book, “Gift of Life.”
“He’s been a great friend throughout the years,” Landwirth said of Cronkite. “We talk for sure on New Year’s and Christmas and holidays and birthdays, and when I’m in New York, we see each other.”
Cronkite is also on Dignity’s advisory board.
Landwirth owned five hotels in Orlando, the last of which he sold in 2006.
Restoring Dignity
Landwirth said he founded Dignity-U-Wear mostly for children.
He said more than half of the clothing Dignity distributes goes to kids. And though he has not seen one child receive a new outfit, he knows the face of gratitude.
The charity partners with Stein Mart. Landwirth said in cities where the company has a presence, its employees act as advocates for Dignity.
“The nice part is that they are our eyes – watching, so that none of our merchandise can wind up in flea markets,” he said.
In the early days of Dignity, Landwirth said Stein Mart lobbied its manufacturers to donate merchandise to the charity.
He said Stein Mart’s fund-raising brings Dignity about $600,000 each year.
“Stein Mart is very important to us,” he said. “I can tell you if anything happens to Stein Mart, God forbid, we won’t be here.”
The money Stein Mart raises, Landwirth said, goes to pay employee salaries.
Dignity Executive Director James Diehl said the administrative costs of the organization are about 1 percent of the organization’s total budget.
The costs are kept low by the work of volunteers. More than 7,000 worked at Dignity in 2006, putting in about 27,000 hours.
They are retired grandparents, college students and mothers with children in school. They are men and women working off “sweat equity” hours required by HabiJax to purchase a home, members of the Junior League and students at a local school for the mentally disabled.
“Most of them come back after their hours are done,” said Dignity-U-Wear Director of Development Cindy Sadler. “It’s because they love it and they become part of the family.”
Volunteers sort clothes by size, so each recipient gets something that fits.
“Otherwise, what’s the point?” said Landwirth.
Landwirth said he is amazed by how far Dignity has come from its start in a 300-square-foot storage rental.
“We didn’t even have a light, we had to go to the hallway and look at the sizes,” he said. “Never in my wildest imagination did I think this would go the way it’s going.”
Landwirth said Dignity has about $20 million in merchandise in two warehouses.
In the 12,000-square-foot facility on Myrtle Street, towering, orange metal racks hold plastic bins and cardboard boxes stuffed with new clothes.
“The stuff doesn’t sit, it rotates pretty quickly,” said Sadler.
A few years ago, Sadler said most of the shelves were bare.
“It’s sad that the need for it has continued to grow, but we have been able to keep up with their needs,” she said. “That’s when you feel like you’re making a difference.”
Dignity’s Community Outreach and Volunteer Manager, Peggy McDonald, said Landwirth is consistently on her mind as she is working to grow the charity.
“He has to be,” said McDonald. “His is truly a life of miracles. He’s always got a smile on his face. He’ll crack jokes. He’s a humble, warm and loving man.”
One symbol of Landwirth’s humility is his home, a simple, one-story house in Ponte Vedra Beach. Though it is plush, examples of homes his money could have purchased front the ocean just across the highway.
McDonald said Landwirth’s humbleness is nearly matched by his determination to help others.
“He knows what it takes to move mountains, because he has moved them,” she said. “I believe that when his life ends, he will have touched as many people in a positive way as perished in the Holocaust.”
Charity at heart
Landwirth started buying Holiday Inns in early 1970’s Central Florida. Walt Disney World had momentum, and Landwirth was positioned for success.
It was at one of the hotels that Landwirth’s philanthropy was born.
“I found out there were two children who died before they had the chance to be with us at the hotel,” he said. “And I said ‘That just cannot be. That just cannot be for a child who has a last wish to go see Mickey Mouse and dies.’”
Landwirth rose from his desk and told his secretary he’d be back in about six weeks.
During his time away, Landwirth created “Give Kids the World,” a 96-villa property that provides free accommodations for families and terminally ill children – and with donations from corporate partners, free tickets to Orlando theme parks and other destinations. The 70-acre village hosts about 7,000 children a year and has welcomed approximately 80,000 families since its inception.
Landwirth said that initially, he didn’t know what inspired him to create “Give Kids the World.”
“But when I stared to look at these children’s faces, I recognized that was like looking at my face when I was in camp,” he said. “It was the same face. I said ‘That’s meant to be. Someone up there tells me to do that.’
Landwirth said he had similar inspiration in starting Dignity.
“I’m a very traditional Jewish guy. I don’t go to synagogue every week, but here – I am very Jewish,” Landwirth said, cupping his hands to his heart.
Landwirth has founded eight charities, the first of which, the Fanny Landwirth Foundation, funded a senior home and a children’s school in Orlando and provides scholarships to needy children in Israel.
It was named for his mother.