sentences:  Between 1944 and 1946, about 150,000 people, mostly but not all of Polish extraction, left the area for Poland (about 10% of this group may have been Lithuanians hoping to escape Soviet rule).Between 1955 and 1959, another 46,000 Polish-speakers left Lithuania (see the Ethnic history of the Vilnius region).Meanwhile, the Jewish population of the area, just as in the rest of Lithuania, was virtually exterminated by the Nazis during World War II.