In the immediate postwar time, Poland’s birth rate surged upward and many Poles were repatriated from military duty or imprisonment abroad. This population increase was tempered, by continued emigration of ethnic groups such as the Jews and non-Polish Slavs after the war ended. The annual growth rate peaked in 1953 at more than 1.9 %; between 1955 and 1960, it averaged 1.7 % before dropping to 0.9 % in 1965. The growth rate then remained fairly steady through 1980. In the early 1980s, Poland’s growth rate of 1.0 % placed it behind only Albania, Ireland, and Iceland among European countries. The population increase in the early 1980s was attributed to childbearing by women born in the postwar upswing as well as to lower death rates.

Before World War II the Polish lands were famous for the valuableness and mixture of their ethnic communities. In the provinces of Silesia, Pomerania, and Masuria (then in Germany) there was a remarkable minority of Germans. In the southeast, Ukrainian settlements precontrolled in the regions east of Chelm and in the Carpathians east of Nowy Sacz. In all the towns and cities there were large concentrations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. The Polish ethnographic area stretched eastward: in Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine, all of which had a mixed population, Poles precontrolled not only in the cities but also in numerous rural districts.