A little historical background
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was once among the wealthiest and most politically advanced countries in Europe. This wealth was based on agriculture, both because of the richness of the land and the low cost of labour based on serfdom (as in Russia). The Commonwealth abolished serfdom (indentured slavery) before Russia but little changed for the peasants who continued to provide cheap labour to their aristocratic overlords, organised into five Duchies.
The Commonwealth sat on the interface between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox religion, with each roughly equally represented. In an attempt to limit religious conflict between these forces the Commonwealth had legislated freedom of religious belief. The Roman Papal Legate was one not happy with this and reported: 'This country has become a place of shelter for heretics'. Relative religious freedom began to attract the Jewish Diaspora from an early date and an estimated 80% of the world's Jews came to live here, amounting to around 10% of the total Commonwealth population.
But internal conflicts between the Duchies progressively weakened the Commonwealth, leading up to a disastrous war with Sweden in the mid seventeenth century that reduced the country to a vassal state. According to Wikipedia: Swedish forces completely destroyed 188 cities and towns, 81 castles, and 136 churches in Poland between 1655 and 1660.
Over the next century the Commonwealth's parlous condition led to its partitioning among its neighbours, Austria, Prussia and the Russian Empire (under Catherine the Great). Thus before the end of the 18th century Poland was effectively wiped off the map, and remained so until the end of the First World War in 1918, when Poland and Lithuania were re-established under the League of Nations as independent countries.
As most people know, it was Germany's reinvasion of Poland in 1939 that triggered the Second World War. It's perhaps less well known that Russia simultaneously invaded eastern Poland in accordance with of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, secretly agreed between Stalin and Hitler to reabsorb the territory. It took the two armies less than a month to annex and then to divide the whole of Poland between them: the West to Germany and the East to Russia. The Germans then proceeded to expel many Poles to the East and to replace them with ethnic Germans. Many refugees were shipped to dozens of forced labour camps, known as Gulags, within Russia.
Polish Civilians being expelled to make way for German Settlers 1942-43
Two years later Hitler turned on the Russians in Operation Barbarossa. This went well for Hitler's generals at first but soon turned out to mark the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. The first stage of Operation Barbarossa was to take of the remainder of Poland from the Russians, killing tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and taking tens of thousands more prisoner.
Soviet Prisoners of War 1941
After Germany's defeat by the Allies in 1945 many people celebrated. But for the Poles Russia, the old enemy of 1939, was back, this time as victorious allies of the US, Britain and France.
Now any remaining Jews and other targeted minorities, including other dispossessed Poles released from the Russian work camps, fled the Russians. They were assisted in this by the new Polish Army, formed as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, consisting of Poles who had joined the Allies during the War, some of whom had fought alongside the Australians against the Italians at the Battle of Monte Cassino.
My English father had taught many other Poles to fly fighters and fighter-bombers in Canada when he was a flying instructor in the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), as I have mentioned elsewhere.
Some of these refugees, like the mother of filmmaker Sophia Turkiewicz whose story is told in a new film 'Once My Mother', made their way South to the Black Sea and then by ship to British held Turkey, from where they were taken to refugee camps in Rhodesia, ultimately to be resettled in Australia, England and other parts of the British Commonwealth.
Others were not so lucky. Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' had fallen and the 'Cold War' had begun. The Russians closed the escape routes to the West and even torpedoed refugee ships, as they tightened their grip on Poland and the other Countries of the Eastern Block.
During the war and its aftermath the population of Poland had fallen by nearly a third. 1.1 million had disappeared. Now, during the Soviet period, the population recovered to just over 38 million. It has stabilised since at around this level.
As a result of shared history, recent Russian influence and landform, there is considerable physical similarity between the infrastructure and farmland of Poland and Eastern Germany. But once across a line that forms the now virtually invisible border, the language and script changes and the Euro is no longer an acceptable currency. Poland is again its own country with its own economy.
Like Eastern Germany, Poland has been experiencing rapid economic growth but has endemically high unemployment rates and low rates of pay. As a result the Country is suffering a considerable 'brain drain' as the better educated leave for greener economic pastures in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the World.
We pondered these similarities and differences as we drove across the countryside towards Kraków.