Polish Diaspora

The Polish diaspora refers to people of Polish origin who live outside Poland. The Polish diaspora is also known in modern Polish language as Polonia, which is the name for Poland in Latin and in many other Romance languages.

There are roughly 15 to 20 million people of Polish ancestry living outside Poland, making the Polish diaspora one of the largest in the world. Reasons for this displacement vary from border shifts, to forced resettlement, to political or economic emigration. Major populations of Polish ancestry can be found in Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Ireland and many other European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. Many Poles can also be found in most Asian, African and Australasian countries. There have also been some Poles in Antarctica, though these journeys have been expeditionary in nature.

A large proportion of the Polish citizens who migrated in the early 20th century were Polish Jews, and these also make up part of the Jewish diaspora. Poland was home to the world's largest Jewish population as late as 1938, a decade before the establishment of Israel. Over three million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II. Most survivors subsequently emigrated, since Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah to Israel upon its creation. Many remaining Jews, including Stalinist hardliners and members of security apparatus, left Poland during 1968 political crisis when the Polish communist party, pressured by Brezhnev, joined the Soviet "anti-Zionist" campaign triggered by the Six Day War. In 1998, Poland's Jewish population was estimated at about 10,000–30,000.