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:
“The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“O for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)