posted 08-31-2006 10:08 AM               

Welcome to collectSPACE!

I knew Henri, and played with his children, when my parents (Rene and Scott Carpenter) were down at the Cape for Project Mercury. Please give him my warm regards.

I've long thought Henri's life deserved a book.

But the fact is, because of Henri's association with the early astronauts and later his extensive charitable work, he has met a lot of people, most of whom know his life story very well. But I think they may know only the cursory version, and everyone politely listens to carefully redacted accounts of the Nazis, and Henri's teen-age years in a concentration camp, and losing his extended family, and then, surviving the war and the camps, finding his sister by whistling her favorite overture outside hundreds of boarding houses--until one day his sister walks out of one of these boarding houses to embrace him. I believe they were the sole survivors of an accomplished and extended Belgian-Jewish family.

I think the best possible book would focus solely on the Holocaust story, and do so unflinchingly. You could write an afterword, or Henri could, about his experience as an immigrant hotelier and his hijinx with the Mercury astronauts--tell a tale or two out of school for fun. But the heart of the story, IMHO, belongs in Europe up to 1945 or 1946.

posted 08-31-2006 01:48 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Bill Halamandaris:
The other thing I find interesting as I run the numbers is that he must have been a kid when he ran the Starlight - as young or younger than most of the astronauts. Is my math right?

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