In the aftermath of World War II, some 300,000 Jews found themselves in displaced-persons (DP) camps administered by the Allies in Germany and Italy. The largest of these was located in what had previously been the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Researching the life of the DPs there, Henry Abramson came across a curious and moving document:
[W]ithin months [of liberation, Bergen-Belsen] became the epicenter of a furious revival of the Jewish population, as survivors engaged in what the historian Atina Grossman called “biological revenge”—Jews affirming life in the most elemental manner by marrying and bearing children. By 1948 . . . the DP camps witnessed a birth rate of 36 children per 1,000 Jewish women, approximately seven times the rate for German women. . . .
Many [DPs who were] married before the war could not determine whether their spouses were still among the living. Neither divorced nor widowed, the survivors remained agunot, “chained” to their former husbands (or wives), unable to remarry under Jewish law until the fate of their spouses could be ascertained. . . .
The document I found . . . was something I had never seen before: a sobering prenuptial agreement for a prospective groom who wished to remarry after his wife disappeared in the maelstrom of the Holocaust. Addressed to the “Honorable Court of Justice Established to Address Agunot in the Central Office of the British Zone (in Germany),” the form has the groom agreeing to abide by the dictates of the court should his first wife somehow emerge from the ashes of the Holocaust. The text reads in part: “I, the undersigned, accept upon myself without any duplicity and with good will, without being coerced in any way, that if my first wife returns home . . . I, and the woman that I will marry, will abide by the ruling of the bet din [rabbinic court], whether it requires divorce and the division of assets, or any other matter.” . . .
One can only imagine the tearful conversations between groom and bride, poised on the cusp of their blissful future together, as they reviewed the implications of this painful document. Hope inescapably mixed with tragedy, rebirth entwined with death.
Read more on Jewish Telegraphic Agency: https://www.jta.org/2019/02/27/opinion/what-a-bergen-belsen-prenup-teaches-us-about-jewish-resilience