Polish diaspora

The Polish diaspora refers to people of Polish origin who live outside Poland. The Polish diaspora is also known in modern Polish language as Polonia, which is the name for Poland in Latin and in many other Romance languages.

There are roughly 20 million people of Polish ancestry living outside Poland, making the Polish diaspora one of the largest in the world, as well as one of the most widely dispersed. Reasons for this displacement vary from border shifts, forced expulsions and resettlement, to political and economic emigration. Major populations of Polish ancestry can be found in Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ireland and many other European countries, the United States, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere in the Americas and Australasia, particularly Australia and New Zealand. Polish communities are present in most Asian and African countries.

Poles participated in the creation of first European settlements in the Americas. In the 17th-century Polish missionaries arrived for the first time in Japan. Great number of Poles left the country in the course of foreign Partitions of Poland due to economic exploitation activities and political as well as ethnic persecution by Russia, Prussia and Austria.

A large proportion of Polish nationals who emigrated were Polish Jews, and these also make up part of the Jewish diaspora. The restored Second Polish Republic was home to the world's largest Jewish population as late as 1938 due to mass influx of new refugees escaping genocidal pogroms in the East. It was followed by the reiterated invasion of Poland from both sides. More than 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II. Most survivors subsequently immigrated to Mandate Palestine, since Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah without visas and exit permits at the end of the war. Many remaining Jews, including Stalinist hardliners and members of security apparatus, left Poland during the 1968 political crisis when the Polish communist party, pressured by Brezhnev, joined the Soviet "anti-Zionist" campaign triggered by the Six Day War. In 1998, Poland's Jewish population was estimated at about 10,000–30,000.

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