On the eve of World War II, Poland had a Jewish population of approximately 3,500,000, accounting for 10% of its total population. Ninety percent of the Jewish population fell victim to the extermination planned by the Nazis during the war. Only 350,000 to 500,000 Polish Jews survived.
In the immediate prewar period, the Jewish population in Poland accounted for about 10% of the country’s total population, or 3,500,000 people. According to S. Klarsfeld’s estimate, France was home to between 170,000 and 200,000 Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe*. The majority of them were of Polish origin. They had fled poverty and anti-Semitism.
Often politically active in their home countries, they chose to settle in France out of admiration for the “birthplace of human rights.” Many activists from the Jewish section of the M.O.I. joined the Resistance and were either executed or died in deportation camps.
Following the signing of the German-Soviet Pact on August 23, 1939, Germany and the USSR invaded Poland.
The Nazis first rounded up the Jews and confined them to ghettos. Many of them were thrown into mass graves; most were shot by mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) or gassed in traveling trucks.
Following the decision on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Jews were deported to extermination camps.
Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust by joining Polish Resistance groups and Soviet partisans or by going into hiding.
Of the 6 million Jews exterminated during the war, nearly half were from Poland.
The Polish Jewish population was virtually wiped out during the Shoah.
In 1946, the Jewish population in Poland numbered 240,000, but anti-Semitism was still prevalent. Today, only a few thousand Jews live in that country.
*It is estimated that approximately 170,000 to 200,000 Jews in France in 1940 were immigrants (foreign nationals or recent naturalized citizens).
- Jews from Poland, the largest group (approximately 80,000 to 100,000 people). Many arrived in the 1920s to work or to flee the pogroms.
- Jews from Romania and Russia: Approximately 30,000 to 40,000.
- Jews from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia): approximately 40,000, who arrived more recently after Hitler came to power in 1933.
References:
— Raoul Hilberg, 1988, *The Destruction of the European Jews*. Fayard.
— Henri Minczeles, 2006, A History of the Jews of Poland: Religion, Culture, Politics, La Découverte.
—Serge Klarsfeld, 2012, Memorial to the Deportation of French Jews, Association of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (FFDJF)
