AREA:312,677 sq km (120,725 sq mi).
POPULATION: 38,613,000.
CAPITAL: Warsaw, pop.1,644,500.
RELIGION: Roman Catholic.
LANGUAGE: Polish.
LITERACY: 98%.
LIFE EXPECTANCY: 72 years.
ECONOMY: Industry: machinery, iron and steel, shipbuilding, coal and copper mining, chemicals, electronics. Export crops: meat, sugar, oilseeds. Food crops: seafood, dairy products, grains.

Buffered by the Baltic Sea in the north and the Carpathian Mountains in the south, Poland enjoys no such natural protection to the east and west. Nazi Germany invaded in 1939 and built the Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.35 million Jews and more than 100,000 others were murdered. After World War II Joseph Stalin seized a chunk of eastern Poland as a bulwark for the Soviet Union.

Communists took power in 1947 but did not win Poles away from Roman Catholicism. Agricultural collectivization also failed, and most land remained privately owned, though industries, from the shipyards of Gdansk to the steel mills of Kraków, were nationalized. Years of unregulated industrial growth have left severe environmental problems: Sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide levels in the southern coal-and-steel belt are dangerously high.

In 1980 soaring prices and tumbling wages spawned Solidarity, the Eastern bloc's first free-trade union. Membership reached ten million before the government declared martial law and banned the union. Legalized again in 1989, Solidarity swept Poland's first free elections in more than 40 years and began moving the U.S.S.R.'s largest, most populous satellite toward democracy and free enterprise. Faced with triple-digit inflation, Poland in 1990 introduced a bold economic reform plan. By 1993 the inflation rate had dropped to 40 percent and private shops were spreading, but unemployment and price hikes had weakened popular resolve for the plan, seen as a model for former Soviet-bloc nations.

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