History

Nowhere in Europe will you feel recent history more strongly than in Poland. The country's unenviable position through the ages, between Germany in the west and Russia to the east, and without defensible natural borders, has meant Polish history has been one long struggle for survival.

The Poles first established themselves in the areas to the west of Warsaw around the turn of the first millennium, descendants of migrant Slav tribes that came to Eastern Europe around A.D. 700 to 800. In the first centuries following the first millennium, the early nobility forged a strategic union with an order of crusaders, the Teutonic Knights, to defend Polish interests from pagan Prussians to the west. The Knights built enormous castles over a wide swath of western Poland, and the Poles soon found themselves with a cunning and ruthless rival on their hands for the spoils of the Baltic Sea trade. In 1410, the Poles joined forces with the Lithuanians and others and managed to defeat the Teutonic Knights at Grünwald, in one of the great epic battles of the Middle Ages. That battle is still fondly remembered in Polish history books.

Poland's early capital was Kraków, but the seat of government was moved to Warsaw in the 16th century after union with Lithuania greatly expanded Poland's territory. In the 17th century, the Poles are generally credited with saving Europe in another epic battle, this one against the Ottoman Turks. Commander Jan Sobieski saved the day for Christian Europe, repelling the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

From this point on, Polish history runs mostly downhill. Poland was unable to resist the gradual rise of Prussia in the west and tsarist Russia in the east as great powers. The result was a series of partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, with parts of Polish territory eventually going to Prussia, Russia, and Habsburg Austria. For 125 years, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe.

Independent Poland was restored in 1918 after the collapse of Austria-Hungary and Germany in World War I. The interwar period was relatively rocky, but World War II was Poland's worst nightmare come true. Nazi Germany fired the first shot from Gdansk harbor on September 1, 1939. Russia, under terms of a nonaggression pact with Germany, seized the eastern part of the country a few weeks later. In the ensuing battle between fascism and Communism, Poland was caught in the middle. Nearly a quarter of all Poles died in the war, including some three million Polish Jews. The Nazis used Polish soil for the worst of their extermination camps, at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka, among others. Poland's once-handsome capital of Warsaw was ordered razed to the ground by a Nazi leadership enraged by Polish resistance there. By the end of the war, nearly every one of the city's one million inhabitants had been killed or expelled, and 85% of the city lay in ruins.

Poland was reconstituted at the end of the war, but with radically different borders. Bowing to Stalin's demands, the U.S. and U.K. ceded vast tracts of formerly Polish territory in the east to the Soviet Union. In turn, the new Poland was compensated with former German territory in the west. The Polish borders were shifted some 200km (120 miles) westward. The ethnic German population was expelled and replaced by Poles transferred from the east of the country.

But the end of the war brought little relief. Poland was given over to the Soviet sphere of influence, and though Communism as an ideology held little appeal for most Poles, a series of Soviet-backed Communist governments uneasily led the country for the next 4 decades. The government managed to maintain order through massive borrowing on international financial markets, but mismanagement of the economy led to one crisis after another. In the end it was this desire for higher living standards -- perhaps even more than a desire for political freedom -- that led to the creation of the Solidarity trade union and the genesis of the anti-Communist movement. Solidarity began at the shipyards in Gdansk, but eventually spread to the rest of the country. The initial demands were for higher wages and more influence in managing the economy, but the challenge to the Communist leadership was clear. At around the same time, the Catholic Church had elevated a cardinal from Kraków, Karol Woytyla, to be pope. If Solidarity provided the organizational framework for Poles to resist, Pope John Paul provided the moral inspiration. In early 1989, the Poles held their first semifree election -- a landmark vote that bolstered anti-Communist activists across Eastern Europe. By the end of that epic year, the Eastern bloc was free.

Since the end of Communism, Poland has made great strides, reducing its international debt while living standards have continued to rise. In 1999 Poland realized a longtime goal of joining the NATO military alliance, and in 2004 entered the European Union.