Boy wizard actor gives memorial his first specs

DANIEL RADCLIFFE, who has captivated moviegoers as the bespectacled schoolboy wizard in the Harry Potter films, 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, 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.

An estimated six million Jews died.

The exhibition in Liverpool will open on January 21. The city will host Britain’s Holocaust Day commemorative service on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The 18-year-old Radcliffe, whose mother is Jewish, sent the oval, grey, metal-framed pair of glasses he wore as a six-year-old.

Ms Ono called the project “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”.

Organisers 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.