Demographics of Poland
According to GUS, about 38,325,000 people live in Poland, however, the same report states that the number of residents living in the country all the time is approximately 37,200,000; with 1,125,000 people living abroad for 6 to 7 months or more. It means that the permanent population may be correspondingly smaller.
The Holocaust in Poland
The Republic of Poland was a multicultural country before the Second World War broke out, with almost a third of its population originating from the minority groups: 13.9 percent Ukrainians; 10 percent Jews; 3.1 percent Belarusians; 2.3 percent Germans and 3.4 percent Czechs, Lithuanians and Russians. Soon after the 1918 reconstitution of an independent Polish state, about 500,000 refugees from the Soviet republics came to Poland in the first spontaneous flight from persecution especially in Ukraine (see, Pale of Settlement) where up to 2,000 pogroms took place during the Civil War. In the second wave of immigration, between November 1919 and June 1924 some 1,200,000 people left the territory of the USSR for new Poland. It is estimated that some 460,000 refugees spoke Polish as the first language. Between 1933 and 1938, around 25,000 German Jews fled Nazi Germany to sanctuary in Poland.