Portal:Poland

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Welcome to the Poland Portal — Witaj w Portalu o Polsce

Cityscape of Kraków, Poland's former capital

Poland is a country in Central Europe, bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic to the southwest, Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, Lithuania to the northeast, and the Baltic Sea and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast to the north. It is an ancient nation whose history as a state began near the middle of the 10th century. Its golden age occurred in the 16th century when it united with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the following century, the strengthening of the gentry and internal disorders weakened the nation. In a series of agreements in the late 18th century, Russia, Prussia and Austria partitioned Poland amongst themselves. It regained independence as the Second Polish Republic in the aftermath of World War I only to lose it again when it was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II. The nation lost over six million citizens in the war, following which it emerged as the communist Polish People's Republic under strong Soviet influence within the Eastern Bloc. A westward border shift followed by forced population transfers after the war turned a once multiethnic country into a mostly homogeneous nation state. Labor turmoil in 1980 led to the formation of the independent trade union called Solidarity (Solidarność) that over time became a political force which by 1990 had swept parliamentary elections and the presidency. A shock therapy program during the early 1990s enabled the country to transform its economy into one of the most robust in Central Europe. With its transformation to a democratic, market-oriented country completed, Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, but has experienced a constitutional crisis and democratic backsliding since 2015.

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A gathering of Holocaust survivors and their Polish rescuers in Łódź, Poland

Polish citizens have the world's highest count of individuals awarded medals of "Righteous among the Nations", given by the State of Israel to Gentiles who saved Jews from extermination during the Holocaust. There are 7,232 (as of 1 January 2022) Polish men and women recognized as "Righteous", amounting to over 25 per cent of the total number of 28,217 honorary titles awarded already. It is estimated that in fact hundreds of thousands of Poles concealed and aided hundreds of thousands of their Polish-Jewish neighbors. Many of these initiatives were carried out by individuals, but there also existed organized networks dedicated to aiding Jews—most notably, the Żegota organization. In German-occupied Poland the task of rescuing Jews was especially difficult and dangerous. All household members were punished by death if a Jew was found concealed in their home or on their property. Estimates of the number of Poles who were killed by the Nazis for aiding Jews, among them 704 posthumously honored with medals, go as high as tens of thousands. Notable individuals among the Polish Righteous include Władysław Bartoszewski, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, Irena Sendlerowa and Maria Kotarba. (Full article...)

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Long Market

Credit: Marcin Białek

Baroque town houses along the Long Market (Polish: Długi Targ, German: Langer Markt) in Gdańsk, formerly inhabited by the city's patriciate. Partly visible on the left is the Artus Court, once a meeting place for wealthy burghers, now housing a historical museum.

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... that the Tęcza (pictured), a rainbow arch installation in Warsaw, has been vandalized several times due to anti-LGBT sentiments?
... that an early 18th-century civil war in Poland gave rise to a proverb about a state of division, disorder and anarchy?
... that Berek Lajcher chose a hot summer day to launch a prisoner revolt at the Treblinka death camp while German and Ukrainian guards went swimming in the nearby Bug River?
... that the Biosphere Reserves of Poland include the last and largest remaining mixed deciduous primeval forest on the North European Plain?

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Stanisław Ulam

Stanisław Ulam (1909–1984) was a Polish-American mathematician. Born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family, Ulam earned his D.Sc. in mathematics at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute in 1933. He then worked on the ergodic theory at Harvard University, shuttling between Poland and America, and ultimately settled in the United States after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, becoming an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1943, Ulam joined the Manhattan Project, where he made hydrodynamic calculations to predict the behavior of explosive lenses for an implosion-type nuclear weapon. After the war, he became an associate professor at the University of Southern California, but returned to Los Alamos in 1946 to help Edward Teller develop the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons. Ulam contributed to such fields of mathematics as set theory, topology, transformation theory, group theory, projective algebra, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. With Enrico Fermi and John Pasta, he studied the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem, which became the inspiration for the vast field of nonlinear science. Ulam is perhaps best known for realising that electronic computers made it practical to apply statistical methods to functions without known solutions, and as computers have developed, the Monte Carlo method he invented has become a standard approach to many physical and mathematical problems. (Full article...)

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Kraków's Grand Square (Rynek Główny)

Kraków, situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, is one of the largest and oldest cities in Poland, dating back to the 7th century. As Poland's capital city from 1038 to 1596, Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish scientific, cultural and artistic life, and it remains the spiritual heart of Poland. It is a major tourist attraction whose landmarks include the Main Market Square with St. Mary's Basilica and the Cloth Hall (pictured), the Royal Castle and cathedral on the Wawel Hill, and the medieval St Florian's Gate with the Barbican along the Royal Coronation Route. (Full article...)

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Poland now

Recent events

Poland at the 2024 European Athletics Championships
- On 10 June, Natalia Kaczmarek (pictured) won a gold medal in 400-meter dash.
- On 9 June, Wojciech Nowicki won a gold medal in hammer throw.
On 9 June, the ruling Civic Coalition won the European Parliament election in Poland.
On 8 June, Polish tennis player Iga Świątek won the 2024 French Open, her fifth Grand Slam singles title.
On 21 May, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, a composer best known for writing film scores, died at the age of 71.
On 10 May, an unusually spectacular aurora borealis was observed in large parts of Poland due to an intense solar storm.