This week the Holocaust Survivor Beauty Queen Contest in Jerusalem took place. Artuz Sheva spoke with Holocaust survivor Chedva Raver who is a contestant.
“I enjoy the situation. It’s very nice. They are spoiling us. Giving us a lot of food and a lot of compliments,” Raver says.
Raver was born in Hungary. Her mother was from Czechoslovakia and her father was from Transylvania and Romania
“They both were in the war in Hungary. There they met and they married and there I was born in the end of ’42,” she says.
“When the Germans came to Hungary in 1944, they took the family to the ghetto. After that they took my father to a work camp, and my mother also was on the way to Auschwitz. And on the way, she had luck that [Raoul] Wallenberg saw her and gave her a passport like she was born in Sweden. And this way she survived and she came back and she went to see after me. She didn’t know where I was. I was in the Red Cross. So she found me, and my father also survived. And so we survived just because of Wallenberg.”
In the 1950s, they were living in Romania when they got the chance to move to Israel.
“It was just a dream. I’m glad we are here in Israel. I have a nice family, a daughter and grandchildren,” Raver says. “I just hope there will be no more such things as there was in this war. And there will be only health and quiet in the world and in Israel. Just peace and quiet. That’s what I hope.”
Of living in Israel, she says, “It’s very good to be in our land. We dreamed to be in Israel.”
Dr. Mike Evans, Founder of The Friends of Zion Museum, where the beauty contest is taking place, says that the event has a message: “Celebrating light in the darkness.”
“These wonderful Holocaust survivors are the brightest light. Millions of people will be watching,” Evans says.
He added that the experience working with the contestants was “astonishing.”
“There is one woman that’s here that was saved by Raoul Wallenberg who is in our museum. And it just so happened that the makeup artist taking care of her is a Wallenberg,” Evans says. “So she is alive because of a Christian who cared enough to save a Jew, and here’s a makeup artist who is also a member of the very family who saved her.”