Historical Population
For more details on this topic, see Historical demography of Poland.For many centuries, until the end of World War II, the Polish population was composed of many significant ethnic minorities. The population of Poland decreased due to the losses sustained during the Holocaust, and became one of the most ethnically homogeneous in Europe as a result of radically altered borders after the war. The subsequent repatriations were accompanied by two waves of forced migrations ordered by the Soviet and Polish communist authorities, including the transfers of sizable Polish population from the prewar territories of Eastern Poland, which today are divided between Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, the transfer of ethnic Ukrainians back to USSR, and the Germans to Germany from lands ceded to Poland after the Yalta Conference.
Read more about this topic: Polish Society
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or population:
“Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than that something has occurred.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)