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Friday January 11, 2008

‘Harry Potter’ star donates glasses for Holocaust exhibition

by rob harris
the associated press

“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 art exhibition marking the horrors of the Holocaust.

The British actor joins several 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 will open Jan. 21. The port city in northwest England will host Britain’s Holocaust Day commemorative service Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Several Muslim leaders are set to attend the multicultural service, which is the culmination of a series of lectures, exhibitions, stage shows and musical events recalling the Nazi atrocities and more recent genocides. Jewish actor Jason Isaacs, who stars as the sinister Lucius Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” films, will also take part in the service.

The 18-year-old Radcliffe, whose mother is Jewish, sent the oval, gray metal-framed glasses he wore as a 6-year-old.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, talk-show host Jerry Springer and Yoko Ono have also donated glasses to the exhibition.

“[It is] such a symbolic piece of artwork, which will help people to learn how important it is to never forget the horrors of the Holocaust and to challenge hatred and prejudice wherever it arises,” Ono said in a statement released by the Liverpool City Council.

Organizers are seeking a total of 110,000 pairs of eyeglasses. When installed inside Liverpool Town Hall’s main ballroom, organizers hope 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,” said Jean Evans, the project’s director.

The exhibition will also offer a legacy of its own.

Within weeks, it will be dismantled. The glasses of the famous will be auctioned for charity while the others will be sent to people in developing nations through the charitable group Vision Aid Overseas.

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