Poland’s Independence After a Century

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlotttown, PEI] Guardian

For the long-suffering Polish nation, which had lost its sovereignty by the end of the 18^th century, the end of the First World War entailed more than an end to the fighting.

November 11, 1918, the date of the armistice that ended what was then called The Great War, also provided a promise to recreate a sovereign Polish state.

The three empires that had partitioned the country – Austria-Hungary, Prussian Germany, and tsarist Russia -- all fell victim to defeat and revolution.

Out of the rubble of the First World War were born new states. Some, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were multi-national. The others, including Poland, were created as nation states. 

However, they all promised to protect the integrity of minorities within their borders. The Minorities Treaties were drawn up between the victorious Allies, and 14 newly created or expanded states in Europe and the Middle East, including Poland.  

They governed eligibility for citizenship in the latter states and granted citizens belonging to racial, religious, or linguistic minorities certain collective rights, including protection by the state for their members to use minority languages; and the right for them to establish and control educational, religious, and social welfare institutions.

But efforts in the 1920s to invoke the treaties and enlist the League of Nations to stop discrimination brought no tangible results. In September 1934 Poland unilaterally renounced its obligations under its treaty.

After the 1918 armistice, the Allied Supreme Council, which was determining the frontiers of the re-established Polish state, had created a temporary boundary marking the eastern frontier of Poland, known as the Curzon Line.

However, the Russo-Polish War of 1919-1920, in which Poland was victorious, provided Poland with almost 135,000 square kilometres of land east of the Curzon Line. Most of its inhabitants were not Polish but Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian.

Overall, a full 31 per cent of the population were non-Polish minorities. Of these, according to the 1931 census, 15 per cent were Ukrainians, 8.5 per cent Jews, and 4.7 per cent Belarusians. 

The Second World War was a disaster for Poland, of course, since as many as six million people – more than one-fifth of its overall population of 35 million in 1939 -- were murdered by the Nazis. The postwar 1946 census found just 23,930,000 people left in the country.

The death toll included the mass slaughter of the country’s Jewish community, which numbered about 3.3 million people, and had constituted one-tenth of Poland’s prewar population. 

As well, Poland lost its large eastern territories, inhabited largely by non-Polish minorities, to the Soviet Union, as its border was moved westward along a line almost equivalent to the Curzon Line.

But it gained new territories in the west, wrested from Germany – and in the process expelled about five million Germans from those lands, in what we today would call “ethnic cleansing,” replacing them with Poles displaced from the lost eastern territories.

So, in a sense, it was two of the greatest mass murderers in history, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who “solved” Poland’s minority “problem,” and thus paved the way for today’s Poland.

The “dirty secret” of Polish homogeneity is that it is the war, with its genocide, ethnic cleansing and massive war crimes, that made the country one of the most ethnically and religiously uniform nations in Europe.

Today around 98 per cent of the population of 38.4 million identifies as ethnically Polish, and 87 per cent belong to the Roman Catholic Church.