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Piotrowski's assessment in 1998 of Polish war losses is that "Jewish wartime losses in Poland are estimated to be in the 2.7-2.9 million range. (Many Polish Jews found refuge in the Soviet Union and other countries.) Ethnic Polish losses are currently estimated in the range of 2 million.
At the start of the Second World War, Poland had the largest Jewish population in the world (over 3.3 million, some 10% of the general Polish population). [7] The vast majority were murdered under the Nazi " Final Solution " mass-extermination program in the Holocaust in Poland during the German occupation; only 369,000 (11%) of Poland's Jews ...
In 1939, at the start of World War II, Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (see Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). One-fifth of the Polish population perished during World War II; the 3,000,000 Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust, who constituted 90% of Polish Jewry, made up half of all Poles killed during the war.
One source estimates that 200 to 300 Jews survived the Józefów massacre by hiding in homes, city buildings, and the forest. [19] Many of the survivors came back to their town. Jews from surrounding towns were also relocated to Józefów. The remaining Jewish population was subsequently killed in the September and November 1942 deportation ...
It is not known how many Jews, overall, were helped by Żegota; at one point in 1943 it had 2,500 Jewish children under its care in Warsaw alone, under Irena Sendler. [152] [153] An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Polish Jews survived in hiding. [2] Some rescuers faced hostility or violence for their actions after the war. [154]
The fact that the Polish Jewish community was destroyed during World War II, coupled with stories about Polish collaborators, has contributed, especially among Israelis and American Jews, to a lingering stereotype that the Polish population has been passive in regard to, or even supportive of, Jewish suffering. [44]
Before World War II, Poland's Jewish community had numbered about 3,460,000 – about 9.7 percent of the country's total population. [5] Following the invasion of Poland, Germany's Nazi regime sent millions of deportees from every European country to the concentration and forced-labor camps set up in the General Government territory of occupied Poland and across the Polish areas annexed by ...
Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, most of the 3.5 million Polish Jews were rounded up and confined to newly established ghettos by the Nazis. The system was intended to isolate the Jews from the outside world in order to facilitate their exploitation and abuse. [25]