‘Harry Potter’ Star Donates Eyeglasses for Holocaust Exhibit
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MANCHESTER, England — “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe, who captivated moviegoers as the bespectacled schoolboy wizard, has donated the first pair of glasses he wore as a child to an exhibition marking the horrors of the Holocaust.
The British actor joins Yoko Ono, talk-show host Jerry Springer, a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and other celebrities and members of the public whose spectacles will be linked together in the shape of a railway track — recalling the trains that carried many of the Nazis’ victims to concentration camps throughout Europe.
The exhibition in Liverpool opens January 21.
The 18-year-old Mr. Radcliffe, whose mother is Jewish, sent the oval, gray metal-framed pair of glasses he wore as a 6-year-old.
Organizers are seeking a total of 110,000 pairs of eyeglasses. When installed inside Liverpool Town Hall’s main ballroom, mirrors will multiply the number of spectacles and give the appearance of 330,000 pairs — the estimated number of Jews in Britain at the time of the Holocaust.
“We wanted to remind people of the horrors of the Holocaust, but we wanted an artistic response and not just … a mound of spectacles,” Jean Evans, the project’s director, told the Associated Press. The exhibition will also offer a legacy of its own. After it is dismantled, the glasses of the famous will be auctioned for charity while the others will be donated to people in developing nations through the charitable group Vision Aid Overseas.
The port city in northwest England will host Britain’s Holocaust Day commemorative service on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. To coincide with the Holocaust Day events, an Anne Frank Festival is to open Saturday. A replica of the Amsterdam bedroom where the Jewish teenager wrote her diary will be constructed inside Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral.
The 15-year-old died of typhus in Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945 after being seized from the Amsterdam attic where she, her sister and parents had hidden from the Nazis.
