‡ Poland was a great power from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, but in the eighteenth century it was partitioned three times among Austria, Prussia, and Russia. It was again recognized as an independent state in 1919.
‡ During World War II, about six million Poles, including three million Jews, died from German massacres, starvation, and execution in concentration camps such as Auschwitz.
‡ The Solidarity movement, which demanded greater worker control in Poland, emerged in the early 1980s as one of the first signs of popular discontent with single-party rule and the communist economic system.
